Tips to Condense Your Child's Artwork and School Projects

One of the greatest things about being a parent is having your children create and bring you things. Projects, pictures, drawings and coloring pages provide an interesting view into how your child's mind is growing and changing. However, the front of the fridge can only hold so many coloring pages and drawings and you can only have so many projects on display. This can become even more of a problem if you have more than one child. Here are some tips that you can use to condense your children's art projects and keepsakes and still keep the majority of them.

1. Keep the important ones

Deciding which drawings and coloring pages to keep can be one of the hardest parts of this process. Everyday drawings and projects that your children do should be displayed on the fridge for a period of time and then disposed of. Keep drawings and coloring pages that are firsts such as the first time they drew their name, the first time they drew a stick figure, etc. You can keep drawings like these in a 3 ring binder and place them in protective sleeves. You can also scan your children's drawings into your computer and place all the scans on a CD's to keep them. This takes up the least amount of space but does not allow you to keep the original artwork.

2. Projects

Projects can vary in size and sturdiness and it can be really difficult to decide which ones that you want to keep. Consider allowing your child to choose one of their favorite products from the year and then you choose one as well. This will only make it to where 2 projects are saved per year and that will not take up a huge amount of space. You can purchase small plastic display boxes that can be easily stacked in a box and will protect the project. Make sure to note the date, age, and occasion that go with each project on the display box.

3. Movies

Movies of your children are such fun to show them once they are grown. If you are not one of the lucky ones that can afford a DVD camcorder, you are sure to have a lot of stacked up cassette tapes. Consider combining movies onto DVD's. DVD's are a lot easier to store and you can place more than one movie per DVD. There are companies that will do the change over for you for a small fee.