I read a conversation somewhere on line yesterday where a Mum was asking how people store their children’s artwork and other special things that they make and it reminded me of this post so I thought I’d give it a quick dust off and rehare it with you because I used to hoard their creations so much that I had boxes full of it.
For years we had an ever-changing art gallery on the kitchen walls which was so popular when I posted about it that we were featured in a newspaper sharing our little gallery with the world.
We’d stick up the new art and put what we took down in our art box but gradually, the flow of new art dried up as they got older and the things we had up on the wall started to look a bit tatty so when we redid the kitchen, I needed a new solution.
I started to take photos of their wors of art and gradually went back through the boxes we had in the garage and took photos of all that too. Everything but our favourite pieces then went in the bin. I know, brutal but necessary as we had soooo much.
From then on new additions went on the fridge for a bit and then we took a quick photo and it either went in the bin or into the box containing our vastly reduced art collection.
Then, when they left junior school they were both presented with a leather-bound folder filled with plastic wallets and there were two pieces of work they’d done from every year from Nursery through to Year 6 along with any recognition certificates they’d got during their time at the school and anything else that the school thought they’d want to remember.
It was so amazing to see how their work had come on year by year and to be reminded of all of the things they’ve done and it never occurred to me that all schools might not do this until someone mentioned to me how lucky I was to have this record of their lives at school. There was plenty of space in the back of the folder so we’ve added in our vey favourite pieces and are taking very good care of our little memory books.
I hope your Junior school do something similar to present to your children when they leave in Year 6 but if they don’t you can easily make your own.
Firstly, you need a folder with some display wallets in and although you could just go as simple as an A4 file with some plastic wallets in there, I prefer the hard backed folders that we have ours in as it makes it a much nicer keepsake if you ask me. These are the most similar that I could find to the folders that I have and they’re a perfect size – I’ve just ordered two so that I can make each one of the kids a Volume II of their time at school as they’re both very close to filling the first folders already.
Once you have your folders ready to go, you just need a front sheet for each year at school so you can divide the work and the certificates into year groups and then just wait for the things you want to put in there. You might get things like ‘Star of the Week’ certificates or pieces of homework that stand out as great examples that you can photo and print out to go in there. You could even take a couple of photos of the work from their school books when you get the chance to look through them on parents evenings.
As they move up to secondary school like my two you can add in achievement certificates and I like to take photos of their food tech and other projects to pop in there too.
It always makes me smile to look through them and I hope that in years to come, they’ll look back at their school memories with less embarrassment and cringing than they do at the moment when I show them what I’m adding into the books. 😉
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