When working with parents, often a challenge they face is how to deal with the masses of children’s drawings and schoolwork.  In the case of my mother, nearly all forms of art and every last spelling test for both of her children were kept beyond their college years.  Having those visual reminders of your children when they were young can be important; but it is doing no good piled in boxes and put in storage.  How do you let go of the masses of paper but keep the memories?

Take the time to go through the boxes of work.  You will likely find some pieces of work that are so badly faded or broken that they are destined to be trashed.  Other items you will not have distinct memories of, therefore they are ok to recycle.  For those items that do spark a memory, or best highlight a time in your child’s life, set these items aside.  If possible, make a date with the child who produced the work to go through the items that you kept aside.  At that date, see what pieces the child feels strongly about and set them aside.  Aim for between 10 and 20 pieces of work (yes, you can do it!). 

From there use a service such as Snapfish that will allow you to scan your images, and then send them to the service to have a book of the child’s work made.  Make one copy for you, and one copy to give to the child.  This method of condensing materials into a small book enables easy retrieval when you would like to be reminded of your child’s budding skills! 

Think about it, how often do you pull the massive, heavy, overstuffed boxes out of storage to look at the items?  Likely it is very infrequently as the idea daunting.  Taking the time to consolidate truly important pieces will mean much more than keeping all of the items that only mean a little to you.