Summary: Elementary schoolers can go through a lot of paper.  Here’s what you can do about the construction paper storage.

Allll the Construction Paper!

Part of gearing up to start school meant making sure we had all the necessary supplies.  With two getting ready to start the kindergarten program, construction paper was a biggie!  And the multicolored packages of construction paper only have a few colors in them; they were missing some of the colors we’d need.

So I placed an order at Miller Pads & Paper for one of every color of construction paper they had (our white, grey, and black are waiting off-camera for another magazine file), along with some air-dry clay and non-hardening clay and a few other odds and ends.

But how to store it all?

Problem was, I needed a way to store all that paper, because I don’t expect we’ll go through it all in a month or two!  (I actually suspect it will last us several years, with only the need to fill in a used-up color here and there.)  Leaving it all in a single pile is technically an option, but that just seems to me like a recipe for a real mess in short order (after trying to pull out the color we need from the bottom of the stack!).  I’d looked at some of those fancy horizontal paper sorters made for classrooms (and hadn’t ruled them out) when my mom made a simple suggestion: use magazine holders.

So that’s what we did.  These are inexpensive cardboard magazine holders from IKEA.  (If you don’t have an IKEA nearby, you can get them from Amazon.  You’ll pay around $2.75 per holder.)  They’re a perfect size for the 9×12″ construction paper, and you can fit 6 packages of 50 sheets in each holder.

NOTE: I discovered when I re-ordered because I didn’t have enough, that IKEA apparently has two different cardboard magazine holders.  (Who’d have thought?)  You do not want FLUNS.  They’re only around half as wide and they’re slightly less deep.  You want FLYT.

Paper Colors

The one other thing I wasn’t sure about was what paper colors I really needed to order.  Ultimately, I ended up ordering one of each, because I didn’t know, but I made myself a swatch chart so next time I’ll know what to reorder.  Some of the packages weren’t labeled by color and I had to figure them out by process of elimination, so you’ll see question marks by the ones I wasn’t 100% sure of.

(Keep in mind that colors aren’t always accurately portrayed on screen — which is why Miller doesn’t have a swatch chart or anything to begin with — but at least you can get a rough idea of how the colors compare to each other.  Scarlet and Holiday Red are so close we really didn’t need to order them both.  If I didn’t have them right against each other, I wouldn’t be able to discern any difference at all.)

All the colors look just a tad bluer in the picture (at least on my screen) than in real life.  (Red-orange, for instance, really is red-orange.  The brown is kind of a “baby poop” shade, and the reds are not so pink.)  Definitely not a great option for precise color-matching, but helpful for knowing whether there’s a notable difference between two color choices.

(And just a side note, if you’re a MFW user and looking to order from Miller Pads and Paper, non-hardening clay is one of the MFW’s regular “items to have on hand.”  Rome to the Reformation, though, has a project or two for which clay that hardens is necessary.  And the kindergarten program also requires some 12×18″ paper in Holiday Green or Dark Green for the Christmas unit.)

What About the Oversized Paper?

If you need an entire collection of 12×18″, or similarly oversized, paper, you might need a whole different method of organization.  But if, like us, you only need a color or two in the larger size (and especially if you don’t access these larger sheets very often), we’ve found that it works just fine to lay the larger paper down on the shelf, and stack the magazine files on top of it. 

Updated Nov. 3, 2020. Originally published Aug. 2, 2017.