Clever Ways to Store Your Child’s School Work

Storing your Kids School Work can be daunting but here are some solutions to tame and preserve their school work.

As parents, we want to relish and savor each adorable moment with our children. Well, all of them except tantrums and fits. We can all agree not to look back on those fondly, right?

If you, like me, also love to keep all of the little pieces of artwork and aced spelling tests your littles bring home, you know that it can really start to pile up.

So much so that it may even look like you are a hoarder. To avoid reaching hoarder status, consider one of the following options to cleverly store those precious and prized artifacts of your child’s school career.

This post contains affiliate links

Carefully choose what you decide to keep.

Depending on how many pieces of artwork and miscellaneous papers your child brings home from school, have them choose which pieces they are most proud of.

For younger children, this concept can be hard to grasp because they may be proud of every little piece of paper that has their name on it, especially if they themselves wrote their name. So, a little frontloading and explanation of what it means to be proud may be necessary for this activity to be successful.

Use crates with hanging folders

For each kid, have two crates available. Divide the school year into separate months, with each month having its own hanging folder in one crate. In the other crate, have a separate hanging folder for each school year.

Each time your child brings home artwork and school papers, place them in the designated folder for that month.

At the end of the year, have the child go through and pick one to three things they are most proud of, and put them into the designated school year folder in the second crate.

Use plastic storage bins

This is the option that is probably the least organized, but definitely the easiest to accomplish. You can, as most moms do, purchase plastic storage bins and shove all of the school work in one bin. Each time you add work to it, flatten the rest out until they all fit.

Be wary of opening the lid once the bin is full, however, because it will surely be spring-loaded like a can of snakes.  This is obviously not that clever of an option; but hey, it is still an option!

Use a binder and plastic sheet protectors

This is similar to the crate option from above. This idea, however, requires you to purchase a couple of binders and a set of plastic sheet protectors. Have your child pick out what they are most proud of and place it in a plastic sheet in the binder.

You can use tabbed binder dividers to separate each school year. Something that would be additionally special is if you had your child write a sentence or paragraph explaining why they chose that piece to keep, and what makes it special.

You can have binders for each school year or one large binder with a few items per school year. How you organize it is ultimately up to you and depends on how much stuff your kid brings home (and how much you actually want to keep). 

Get rid of it all

Not literally. If you are the ultimate minimalist, consider using an app Artkive.  This app seems to be a favorite for this type of task. Essentially, you take pictures of all of the artwork and store them in the app, and then you can purchase photo books or mosaics of the artwork.

They are all neatly arranged by your design, and they make great coffee table books. The app is not free and it can be kind of costly to have to purchase the books. Use my link for $20 in savings off your order.

OR you could actually do this yourself!

Buy a large white foam board and take the pictures yourself using the white foam board as a clean background. You can then upload the photos to Shutterfly (they always have tons of coupons floating around – as of today use code FREEPAGES for a discount) and make your own books for much cheaper.

While this is a great way to save space, the downside is that you don’t keep or have the paper copies of the kids’ artwork. Some people prefer to actually see and touch the original artwork. So if you are one of those people, this option might not be the best one for you.

So which is the right storage option for your kid’s school work? Quick Answer!

Are you the ultimate minimalist? I suggest going digital.

Not at all concerned with saving space, and you prefer to keep quite a few of the pieces? I would go with the plastic bins idea.

Are you in between? I suggest going with the crate or binder idea. 

I hope this guide has been helpful to you.

Please let me know how your organizing is going and share any of your own tips below! 

xo, Ellen

Read this next:
10 Books to Prepare your Child for Kindergarten
4 Tips for a Smooth Kids Photoshoot