Paper paper everywhere

My kids like to work on paper, loose paper. We are always swimming in the stuff and it seems wasteful, not to mention hard to manage. For example, they were playing this game with some choices written on paper. I would have torn one sheet into pieces and written a choice on each piece. My kids use a whole sheet for each choice. I am horrified at the amount of paper we recycle each week. When I can I always encourage the kids to take a paper out of the recycle pile, and use the back. But I am not always watching. I have tried hiding our plain paper, tried a rationing system but it hasn't worked. For one, I am just tired of having to police the paper!

As kids we always did all our work in notebooks. I like that idea and I have tried to get my kids a ruled pad for writing and blank paper sketchpad for drawling. I have explained to them many times that how it is easier to save and preserve their work if it is a bound notebook, but it doesn't seem to sink in. Even with a notebook, they tear out a page if they want to work on it! Sometimes they use multiple papers to carry out an idea, then tear those pages out and staple them back together. It is completely insane!

On this trip back to India, kids in my family were on their summer vacation so I had ample opportunity to observer kids at play and amazingly all kids have a 2-3 that they write or draw in! So why is it that my kids only want to work on loose paper whereas the kids in India stick to notebooks?

I think the difference is in how the schools in each country operate. In India, all schoolwork is done in notebooks. That is how it was when I was young and that is how it is now. Kids have a notebook for each subject - mathematics, language, science etc. Sometimes there are separate ones for homework and schoolwork, but all the work for the school year is contained in a handful of notebooks. In the US, kids do most of their school work on loose sheets of paper. For example my daughter has to practice 10 spelling words each week. She has to do multiple exercises with the words every day of the week, and hand in the work every Friday. Here she gets her words on a sheet of paper on Monday, does each exercise on a blank sheet paper through the week, uses both sides only if I catch her and insist on it, staples the week's work and hands it in. I bet if the same exercise was being done in a school in India, there would be "spelling notebook" created early in the year, and the students would do all their exercises in that notebook and hand in the notebook every Friday. Hmm...maybe I should suggest this to the teacher.