What Do You Do with Your Children's Artwork?

I have three pieces of my daughter's artwork framed in identical frames in her playroom, two framed in my bedroom, one smaller one framed on the kitchen counter, and two in her room, and two in her baby sister's room. Framing them makes them look like actual art and very cute decor. As she does more, we change them out and put the new over the old so the old ones are still there. I actually just got another framed to put in her dad's office.

L.,

Something I do is keep a few, put some in frames or on the refrigerator, and then take a picture of my son holding the others. It is a great way to always have picture of what they have created but without the bulk of the actual creations. Good Luck!

I really haven't done anything with most of my 4 year olds yet. It is being stored in a storage bin right now. Some has gotten thrown away as well. My intention is to make a scrapbook with her out of it. She can choose the pieces she wants and we will put it in a book.

Try www.ShareMyKidsArt.com - I love this website! It's free and lets you store and organize your children's art. The thing I like it about the most is it has these little buttons so that you can email or upload to your facebook wall pieces of art; this is really nice for us because we live in California and my parents live in Hawaii and my wife's parents live in NY. If one of our children create something we want to share with the grandparents, we simple press a button.

The only thing is you need to scan or photograph the art, which seems like a hassle but it's actually fairly easy. Good luck!

I have 3 kids and artwork sometimes takes over! I let them choose some to give to aunts and uncles and grandparents. We hang a lot in our unfinished basement. When we're done enjoying them, I scan most of them into the computer and save them on a disk. After we're finished scanning them, we use them for wrapping paper for our family's gifts. I do have a box in the basement for each of our kids that I save my favorites-usually 4-5 pieces per year.

You can always put them in photo albums. Scrapbooking books.

I take pictures of my son and daughters art and then download them on my computer (which is in my kitchen)to use as screen savers. This way everyone can enjoy them all the time and its not cluttering walls and refridgerator. I throw some of them away and store away the best.

I have a file in our file cabinet that holds my son's artwork, as the file gets bigger and bigger I put it in a file box in our storage room. That way when he gets older he can have it and do with it what he wants. I only keep some of it, not all. If I kept it all I would probably need a huge filing cabinet. The projects he does I school I keep, other than that when he's not looking I toss it. I also tape his artwork to our basement walls. That way some of his artwork is proudly displayed in the house.

Like Julie mentioned, I think scanning is a great idea. If the artwork is too large to scan, I have taken a picture of the artwork to save digitally. Though I know that some things you just have to keep for yourself...

As you get overwhelmed with artwork tape it to a wall and have him stand in front of it and take a picture. Keep a few that you are really partial to and throw the rest out. You can put them in an underbed plastic storage bin and go through it once a year and dispose of those that you find are not as important as you thought in the beginning. Or the most expensive is to take the artwork to someplace like Kinkos color copy it in a smaller size. Hope this helps and good luck.

You could always take a picture & save the pictures or if you have a diital camera, make a CD of all of his artwork through the years - it'll be neat to see how it changes. (Of course, by the time he's grown there will be some other more sufficient technology)

Sorry this took so long. I took pictures of the art work and made a small album of all of it. Kept my favorite pieces and tossed the rest.

I throw some away, I hang some around, and I have a poster size board that I use to frame two or three pieces. I never throw any away until about 4 months after it was made, and I always keep lots.