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It's only mid-October and already I'm swimming in my daughter's Kindergarden art projects. I'd imagine any of you with school-age children are in the same boat. I also imagine there are some of you who aren't overly sentimental and are comfortable tossing them away after a while. But for most of us, we want to hold on to every bit & piece of our children's childhoods, for them to look back on as they grow older, maybe even to show their OWN children some day. But if we were to actually keep every piece of paper and project they bring home over their school years, we'd need to rent a storage unit to store it all. So I'm here with a helpful tip for you. Design and print a book of your child's art. I did this for my daughter's preschool years and am preparing to create another of her more recent artwork.
It's actually a quite simple process. Gather all the artwork you deem special, AKA "Keepers," then either scan if small enough, or photograph if larger and/or three-dimensional. Upload all the images to a folder on your computer (I called mine "Caitlin's Art") then upload them to your favorite digital photo book site. For the one pictured here, I used Shutterfly's 12x12 size with lay flat pages. You can decide to arrange your book chronologically, by season or school year (you can combine several years as I did) or you can arrange by category. Perhaps they had phase of drawing rainbows, self-portraits, etc. You can group those images all together to visually SEE the progression of their skills. You can leave the book as simple as images alone, or provide captions when necessary to explain a project. Or even have your child tell you a story about the image and include the entire text on the following page.
Once your book is completed, ordered and received, your child will LOVE "reading" it with you. They will feel a sense of pride that you cared enough about their art to turn it into a book, which will in turn increase their self-confidence. As they grow, they will also enjoy being able to pull a book down off the shelf that houses their art in one simple package vs. digging through bins and bins of original art. Once you feel comfortable that your artwork images are backed up in several locations, you can take that final step of throwing away the originals. Maybe not ALL of them, but enough that your house isn't overflowing with children's artwork.
If you've enjoyed reading my #FeelGoodBlogging challenge posts so far, I invite you to sign up for my monthly newsletter subscription list. Once you join, you'll receive access to my exclusive ABC's of Photo Organizing video!
It's actually a quite simple process. Gather all the artwork you deem special, AKA "Keepers," then either scan if small enough, or photograph if larger and/or three-dimensional. Upload all the images to a folder on your computer (I called mine "Caitlin's Art") then upload them to your favorite digital photo book site. For the one pictured here, I used Shutterfly's 12x12 size with lay flat pages. You can decide to arrange your book chronologically, by season or school year (you can combine several years as I did) or you can arrange by category. Perhaps they had phase of drawing rainbows, self-portraits, etc. You can group those images all together to visually SEE the progression of their skills. You can leave the book as simple as images alone, or provide captions when necessary to explain a project. Or even have your child tell you a story about the image and include the entire text on the following page.
Once your book is completed, ordered and received, your child will LOVE "reading" it with you. They will feel a sense of pride that you cared enough about their art to turn it into a book, which will in turn increase their self-confidence. As they grow, they will also enjoy being able to pull a book down off the shelf that houses their art in one simple package vs. digging through bins and bins of original art. Once you feel comfortable that your artwork images are backed up in several locations, you can take that final step of throwing away the originals. Maybe not ALL of them, but enough that your house isn't overflowing with children's artwork.
If you've enjoyed reading my #FeelGoodBlogging challenge posts so far, I invite you to sign up for my monthly newsletter subscription list. Once you join, you'll receive access to my exclusive ABC's of Photo Organizing video!
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