School Work Storage

Do you have a million papers and art creations all over the place? I did. I felt like it was overwhelming as the school year ended. There were stories, drawings, math problems, art creations, and a bit of everything else! So what do you do with all of this wonderfulness? We can save it, but what will they do with it later in life? Pitch it? Probably. So I decided that I would scrapbook it. I started by taking pictures of each piece of work (yes this took a while). I used a light box that I made using this tutorial. This allowed me to get good, clean pictures of their work without any shadows. Then I scrapbooked the pictures using my digital scrapbook program. I added some pictures of the girls working and some of the other fun things we did that I didn’t have papers for. My hope is that this will become a fun way to look back over what we have done this year! I made sure I wrote out some of the details of what we learned for each subject so we can remember (I didn’t include any of those pages for you to see though, since they have the girls names all over them)!  I think that they turned out pretty well. Here are a few of pages I made for the girls:

Here are some pages from Pup’s book:

Lily's School Work - Page 020

Lily's School Work - Page 017

Lily's School Work - Page 016

Lily's School Work - Page 013

 Lily's School Work - Page 008

Lily's School Work - Page 004

There are some from Bunny’s Book:

Carly's Work - Page 018

Carly's Work - Page 013

Carly's Work - Page 008

Carly's Work - Page 004

This project took me weeks to finish, but I think that it is worth it. Not only was I able to save their work digitally. It also made me realize that we did a lot more work then I thought! It was so cool to put them together and see how the girls grew, changed, and learned over the year. It really was a blessing and helped me recover a bit from the burnout I was feeling. To see the great learning and the fun we had made me ready to start thinking about how to work next year too! Plus clearing things up is always a great way to feel accomplished! 🙂 So here is my question for all of you:
How do you save, preserve, and keep all those memories? Do you save them all or do you toss things out? Do you have a portfolio or just a box? I would love to hear what you do! Happy Summer!

PS. Yes I did throw out most of their work after it was photographed. They did each save a folder full of their favorites!