Kid art and school papers: what to keep and what to let go

A preschooler can bring home a startling amount of paper. Finger paintings, worksheets, a macaroni necklace, eleven drawings of the same cat. Keep all of it and you'll need a storage unit by third grade. Throw it all away and you'll feel terrible the day they ask where their dinosaur went. Most families need something in between that takes a few minutes a week and doesn't rely on willpower.

The system: one box per kid per year

1. A landing spot. One tray or basket by the door where everything goes the moment it leaves the backpack. Not the counter. The tray.
2. A display spot. The fridge, a corkboard, a wire with clips, or a frame that opens from the front. New work goes up here. When something goes up, something comes down.
3. A weekly sort. Once a week, go through the tray. Most of it gets photographed and recycled. A few pieces go in the box.
4. One box per kid per school year. A flat bin that fits under a bed, labeled with name and grade. When it's full, it's full. That limit is the whole trick. It forces choices without anyone having to make rules about them.

What's worth keeping

• Handwriting at a new stage. The first time they wrote their name, the first story with a beginning and an end.
• Self-portraits and family drawings. These change the most from year to year, and they're the ones you'll go looking for later.
• Anything they made for you without being asked.
• The "all about me" sheets teachers hand out in September. Favorite food, best friend, what they want to be. Funnier every year you reread them.
• One or two pieces they're proudest of. They get to pick those.

What to let go

• Worksheets. Math pages, spelling tests, coloring pages of someone else's drawing. Keep one as a sample of the year if you like.
• Duplicates. If they drew the cat eleven times, keep the best cat.
• 3D projects that are falling apart. Photograph them from a couple of angles, then let them go. A glitter castle will shed on everything you own.
• Anything made of food. Pasta and cereal art attracts bugs in storage. Those are photo-only.

Photograph first, then recycle

A good photo keeps what you'll actually look at again. Lay the piece flat near a window in daylight and shoot straight down so it doesn't turn into a trapezoid. Now and then, take one with your kid holding it. In ten years the kid in the photo will matter as much as the drawing.

Document scanners built into phone apps, like the scan option in the iPhone Notes app, straighten and crop pages automatically. Save everything into one album per kid per year with a name you'll find, like "Maya art, 1st grade."

If you'd rather hand the job off, Artkive is one well-known option. Its app organizes photos of your kid's art by age and date and turns them into a printed hardcover book, and the company also sells a mail-in box where they do the photographing for you. It isn't cheap, so check current pricing and exactly what the box price covers before you order. The budget route is to take the photos yourself and print a small book each year through whatever photo book service you already use.

Let them choose

Kids from about four can help sort, and it usually goes better than parents expect. Hold up two pieces and ask which one goes in the box. Most kids are less attached than we are, especially to things they made months ago. They do notice when work quietly disappears from the fridge, though, so sort with them now and then, or at least keep the recycling bin out of their line of sight.

At the end of the school year, go through the box together one last time. It's a good conversation: what they remember making, what they'd draw differently now.

Give a few pieces a real frame

One or two pieces a year deserve better than a magnet. An inexpensive frame from any big store turns a crayon drawing into something that looks intentional on a wall, especially in a row of matching frames you swap every season. Our post on kids' room wall decor has more ways to mix their art with everything else on the walls.

You won't remember most of the worksheets. You will want the drawing of your family where the dog is bigger than the house. Keep that one.