We move every 3 years thanks to military life, so I try to declutter as much as possible. I know keeping some of the kids’ work will be fun to look at down the road.
I have two tips to easily keep your child’s artwork and projects collected and safe as they grow from toddlers to school age, and keep the piles of papers off of your kitchen counter!
When my children were toddlers, I started saving their crayon drawings, scribbles and paintings in an expandable file. This is my first storage solution for kids art.
I wrote each age on a tab and saved (and still do save) the most memorable pieces. We use these for all their work they do at home and what they do in school.
Of course, the volume of work is large once they are school age, so here is what I do to manage it.
Storage Solution for Kids Art and Projects
1.) Grab a plastic bin (clear, and I will tell you why below) either small or medium size depending on whether you will keep some or all of the kids’ work.
3.) When school picture time happens, grab one extra photo of your child. Write the date, age, year on the back, and slide it inside the bin so you can see it from the outside. (This is why clear is great.)
I also place a class photo in one side and even an extra copy of our family’s photo Christmas card. I can see it from the outside of the bin which will offer a quick way to reference the year/grade.
You can stop at this point if you have space to store plastic bins for each grade level. I like to further reduce the amount of saved work-we only get to move so many pounds each military move!
4.) I go through the bin at the end of each school year so I can weed out redundant paintings or worksheets and save the special activities.
My children help me look through for the projects that mean the most to them.We then file these items in the expandable file as our long-term storage solution for kids art. (Look how little space it takes up!) Then you can use the same bin year-after-year to store work throughout the school year.
I had fun filing through my own childhood school work when I was a child and my children enjoy looking back on what they were able to do when they were younger.
Obviously, only flat projects or ones that can be folded can work with the expandable file method. You can take a photo of any large projects and print it off to save in the file. That is a nice way to remember without storing the extra bulk of big projects!
It is a nice retrospective on the growth that our children go through over the course of their early education through high school. I hope this tip can help keep the desktop or kitchen counter free of the clutter of saved school work! I know it helps in my home.
What is your storage solution for kids art? Any tips to share?
I want to thank Kim, from The Educator’s Spin On It, for organizing this blog link-up for you all!
Have fun searching all the information and tips from 26 other bloggers sharing who are members of the Kid Blogger Network below!
Participating Blogs
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Wow, I am blown away over all these posts in one spot! will need to come back and spend some time exploring. Visiting via LOBS link up. Thanks for pulling this all together.
Barb, the credit for this link-up goes to Kim from The Educator's Spin On It. I was just a willing participant. 🙂 Link up your post and please share this with other bloggers who would like to participate. Thanks for stopping by!
As always, so great!! Thank you for all the wonderful resources!!
Thanks, Jamie…and, you bet!