Every mom shares the same dilemma. What to do with all the wonderful art your child creates! Without strategies for display, organizing and editing, these delightful treasures will just pile up and become a burden of clutter. Here’s my top 10 neat ideas on how to keep their art from becoming clutter.
- Set policies on how much you are going to keep. For example, you might decide you want to keep only the top 10 - 20 pieces per year.
- Edit regularly. Keep only the very best or most meaningful. Each day or week, pick your favorite. At the end of the month, pick the best of the month. That’s the one that gets put in a scrapbook or in a special memorabilia box. Involve your child in selecting his or her favorite. This helps your child learn that not everything is worth keeping, which is a very valuable organizing skill to learn early on.
- Go digital! Take digital photos of art you really love and recycle the rest! This preserves the art much longer. Paper eventually fades and tatters.
- Create an album or scrapbook for each school year and include photos of the best art along with other projects.
- Label the work. Mark the back of artwork you decide to save with the child name, date and the reason you kept it.
- Create a revolving gallery. Create a space on a wall or other area that becomes a revolving art gallery. Use magnetic boards, cork boards etc. Provide one spot for each child and hang their photo or a name marker above their spot. Each time to you change the art decide if the old piece is worth saving.
- Repurpose and recycle. Find creative uses for art work you don’t want to keep. Use it as:
- Gift wrap
- Inserts for greeting cards
- Drawer/shelf liners
- Decorate containers to use as organizers for arts & crafts supplies
- Creative disposal placements for a meal. Or, if it’s really good, mount it to construction paper, laminate it, and use the art as place mats for a longer time.
- Get funky with clipboards. As an inexpensive and fun alternative to frames, use colorful clipboards mounted on the wall to create an art gallery for your child’s room. Let them decide what they want to hang and when they want to change it. Clipboards allow them to easily change out art frequently.
- Draw the line. Hang a clothesline across a wall in an area where you want to display art and hang it with clothespins. This makes it easy to change the art whenever you or your child wants to!
- Make gifts.Create unique gifts for relatives with good pieces. You can make little books, puzzles, calendars, and more. Encourage your child to help think of ways to transform art into fun gifts.
© 2006 Ariane Benefit, Neat Living
Ariane Benefit, M.S.Ed., is a professional organizer, coach, author and speaker with over 25 years experience helping people and businesses reach new heights of performance. She has written over 90 articles & posts which can be found on the popular "Neat Living Blog: Neat Ideas for Living" at http://www.NeatLiving.net and at http://www.NeatLiving.org Ariane resides in Bloomfield, NJ with her husband, Alan and three adorable Maine Coone cats. When not helping people organize their lives, she enjoys gardening, entertaining, traveling and riding her motorcycle.
