It’s the end of the school year, which means all your kids’ teachers are sending home assignments in droves. Your kitchen countertop will soon be overtaken by their brilliant handiwork! If you’re a sentimental soul or someone who gets paralyzed by a lot of clutter, this can feel really overwhelming as you try to figure out where it to store everything. You need a plan, my friend! As we prepare for those last weeks of school, start prepping now by creating a process for curating those important keepsakes, assignments, and crafts. You can go ahead and clear out a space, purchase the supplies, and make a list of the things you’d like to keep and what you think can go in the trash.
Photograph by Devon Anne
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Section of a children's artwork wall. Artwork from both a toddler with scribbles, and a school aged child with hearts and the American flag.
If you’re feeling paralyzed by indecision, you can even get a friend to help you, or involve your kids in the process if you want to empower them to take ownership of their things. This can be helpful in discovering what is important to them as well if you’re worried about hurt feelings. We’re never going to tell you what to toss and what to keep, but perhaps you could use a little guidance as you sort through the hordes of papers and projects.
Children largely bring home papers and small projects from school and extracurricular activities. It can be challenging, especially in the early school years when there’s a firehose of papers coming home every day, to decipher what is worth holding onto. You’ll have to decide what is meaningful to keep for you, but I’d like to encourage you to be choosy with this process. Your child will likely bring home multiple handprint projects in those preschool and early-elementary years, so hanging onto just one each year should be plenty. (You don’t need five handprints from Pre-K!) They’ll also likely write their name on tons of papers, so I like to hang onto just the ones that show a new phase of development. We’re big fans of keeping the questionnaires they often do at school when they’re Student of the Week or as a Mother’s Day gift and any meaningful achievement or award, such as a kindness certificate or a running club medal. In our home, report cards and perfect attendance awards don’t make the cut because I don’t attribute a lot of meaning to what they represent, but you get to make that call for yourself.
To help cull through the papers, I like to ask myself: “Does this item represent a specific moment in time/phase of development for my child?” “Was this truly made by my child, or was it primarily made by their teacher?” “Will my child want this/care about this in the future?”
Photograph courtesy of Tara Bremer, House Peace
These Pioneer Jumbo Scrapbook Storage Boxes from Amazon are a perfect size to neatly store your kids’ school papers and artwork.
It can be an overwhelming challenge to begin the curation process if you’ve previously been holding onto more keepsakes than you’d prefer. If you have a lot to go through, set aside some time to sort through everything. Once you’ve dedicated a few hours to going through your collection, it’s much easier to maintain weekly or even daily as more papers enter your home. I also like to get our memory boxes out once a year for the kids to look through, and it always ends up being a bit of a purging session. There are many occasions when my children will make art at home or school and ask me to keep it in their memory box, which I always do. However, as time goes by, they often see less value in that art, and they decide to toss it. It’s a great practice for them to be involved in so they can learn the skill of curation alongside you. It’s best not to involve them in your initial purge, but once you’ve started a more manageable collection, they can often weed out things that were once special to them but no longer are.
Once you’ve settled on what you’re keeping and what you’re letting go of, it’s important to store these keepsakes properly. We like streamlined boxes with lids such. While you’ll likely need multiple boxes for each child, these stack nicely and are attractive enough to keep in an accessible, visible place. If you’re planning to store the keepsakes somewhere less visible, like a closet or attic, you could go with 11- by 14-inch plastic lidded bins. Happy curating!
For more in-depth training on this topic, visit housepeace.net/shop for Tara Bremer’s “Curating Kids’ Keepsakes” course.