Decluttering, Organizing and Preserving Kids Artwork

Being parents it can be a challenge to manage and overcome the amount of kid’s school and art work that comes home each day. But there is a simple way to tackle it. One of the ways we have conquered it is to set routines and try to stick with them but also, we give ourselves grace. We like to select some to keep, display and preserve. You may ask what do I mean by preserve and below I will share a little more about this step. 

School just got out for us May 31st and since, following this, I had piles of artwork and school work to sift through. Through the school year, each day papers get moved from the folder to a paper bin at the top of our lockers. This works great for us and if there is no locker, any drop zone will do. Daily yet most of the time it falls weekly for us on Saturday mornings, we go through it. We take a look and enjoy the work our kids have done and also decide what is trash, display worthy and what we want to retain/preserve.

I will usually make a note on the back of the document with the month/year and name of the child whose work it is. I give myself flexibility and sometimes its monthly or it is quarterly or half way through the year 😊 I am cleaning up the display board. 

In the mix of going through artwork, there may be papers or artwork I want to preserve. So, I make a choice, this could mean one or two options. This is so simple but it does take an extra minute or two. I keep a white poster board on hand. You can get one at the Dollar Tree. I will find a space that is in front or near a window that gets great light and lay the artwork down on the board, and using my camera on my phone I will snap a pic. I have an iPhone and I generally use the square option and follow the grid and snap the picture when the grid shows centered. I change the metadata to as needed to make sure it reflects the correct year/month. And it goes into my camera roll.  Pictures is how you can change the metadata (date of the photo, etc.) and use the square setup on the camera app to snap the picture. Really you can do it however works for you and to your liking.  

Tip - if you like to collect your kid’s artwork, consider creating an album in your photo library for their art so it’s easy to find later. For us, if it is not displayed on the board for the time being, then it will go into a kid’s memory bin. 

This works great to keep special documents and artwork for later. My method I chose that works great for me is a folder or two for each daycare class and school year class. There are these templates for free online, yet you can easily make your own as well using Word or Canva. 

Now the fun add that I began doing as I started creating family yearbooks. This could simply be done to create your child’s own art photo book if you choose as well. I love to collect some of the top photos and add them into our photo book for a year in the review section and sometimes they are sprinkled into the monthly pages depending on what the theme of the artwork is. For example, Thanksgiving’s thankful turkey art will be on the November spreads. No editing is required, but you may use some photo editing programs or I like to use Canva and remove the background to help highlight the art/photo. 

The idea is that at the end of the year (or honestly it can end up being an ongoing process throughout the year), you will have a system that works to keep the paper clutter down and your kids paper/artwork organized and preserved whether it is stored in your organized memory bin, box or whichever method you decide to keep hardcopies or your digital copies of the ones you may want to look back on easily through pulling up in your photo library, camera roll or your photo book! 

Now, I can’t say that I don’t cringe each time my kids bring home a bunch of random papers/art, but it helps we start this system that works for us that helps keep the panic down. 😊

If you want to hear more tips for managing your kids school work, are interested in starting an art photo book and have questions, or simply want to hire someone to put your kid’s artwork into a photobook, feel free to check me out memoriesmadesimpledsm.com, or IG: memories.made.simple_dsm  and IG) or contact me at ashley@memoriesmadesimpledsm.com. 

Happy Organizing!