Every parent reaches that point; do I keep the craft, hide it, throw it away? How do you deal with the never ending crafts, poems, colouring pages, paintings? When your kids are younger you want to keep it all! You feel so guilty not holding onto something your beautiful child created. As the years go by, the stash of crafts gets bigger and bigger before you have no idea what you will do with everything. It is ok to let some items go. As the adult, think about the childhood momentos you held on to. What was your reaction? One day your child will be you. Let go of the guilt, and the clutter and get organized!
My kids are older now at 11 and 13. The crafts have definitely slowed as have the finger paintings! Neither of them look at their collections and ask where a specific art piece is. I promise, as parents we are much harder on ourselves than our kids are. I started minimizing and sorting their artwork years ago. This is a system that keeps things under control, but also allows for memories and storage solutions.
I started with an accordion file folder. Each section has a year and that is all the space the year gets.
Each year is labeled so it makes for easier storage and sorting. I put the crafts that come home up on our big cork board. Each piece is named by the child and dated as it is put up. This makes sorting so much easier as some years it was hard to tell who did what!
Whatever fits in that year in the file is what they get to keep. They can look back at years past and see how they have grown. By keeping all the items in one simple folder it means less clutter, easy to find and organized! Bonus, the files have a handle so the kids can take their old art pieces with them when they move out!
Everyday Functionality 