Monday, October 26, 2009

Organization 101: Children's Artwork

Now that I have entered the world of a child in school, I'm starting to see how my child's artwork could easily take over my house. I'm trying to reign it in though by only saving a few items. Each day, when he comes home from preschool, I pull out all of the papers from his backpack. If something is special to him, we hang it on the fridge. The rest we save until daddy gets home to see it. Then, if it is not important to him, it goes into the recycling bin (this usually happens after he goes to bed as he would pull it out if he noticed it in there). We rotate out the pictures on the fridge often as to keep it from getting cluttered.

My plan for the special papers is to have two plastic tubs. One will be to store everything from this year that is keepsake worthy. At the end of the year, I will go through it and weed it out to a more manageable size. The second tub is to keep what I weed out. My plan is to add to that second tub each year for several years and reuse the first tub each year to store a year's worth of work. Growing up, we each had a special drawer to keep our artwork in. Once the drawer became full, we had to weed it out. This one drawer lasted us from preschool to high school so I know it can be done.

How do you keep up with all of the paper and artwork from school? Feel free to leave a comment and let my readers know so we can all keep up with the endless paper coming through our doors.

1 comments:

The Kallenberger 5 said...

Hey girly! I think I am doing something similar to you. I have one box for each child that I put all their creative artwork in or anything that shows their development. Worksheets or art that look just like everyone else's in the class gets tossed since it tells me nothing about my child's individuality. Before I put it away I always date it and add any labels the child put on it, which will also help me see development as I go through it. At the end of the year, I will weed through it and choose what to save. Now that Gabe is in kindergarden, it is a little more difficult since he is constantly learning how to add to his artwork or writing. But to me the most important thing is that it is original work.

 
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