Child Number One has started making her own books. She’s drawing pictures and writing captions on several sheets of A4 paper before binding them with sticky tape.
It’s very sweet to watch and is excellent practice for her reading and writing. It’s also a joy to know she finds books inspiring.
The only thing is, this activity adds to the huge amounts of arts and crafts stuff coming into the house. There are paintings and drawings from school, written work, models and so on plus bits and pieces from other groups she’s involved with. Added to this, Child Number Two is now producing her own works of art, both at nursery and at home.
We’re swimming in the stuff. There’s barely a surface or wall in the house that hasn’t got some kind of artwork on it. I know for a fact there are even several pieces lying in the footwell of the car, slowly but surely getting covered in footprints and mud.
I’m afraid a tough decision has been made; we’re throwing lots of this stuff out. Sure, we’re keeping the better pieces and have even allocated a box where it’s all being stored. The more run of the mill stuff, however, is being dispatched as soon as I think I can remove it from the house without the kids realising what I’m up to (I say kids, I’m really referring to Child Number One as Child Number Two is far too young to appreciate what’s happening).
To my surprise, this is causing me a certain amount of heartache. I’ve never been one to get emotional when a child has proudly presented me with a picture they’ve just drawn. I’ve generally gone through the motions of praising them and telling them it looks wonderful before urging them to produce something else.
When it comes to my own children, it just feels wrong to get rid of this stuff. I’ve spoken about this to two more experienced parents and their approach seems to be considerably more ruthless. It seems I’m a big softy!
That’s enough about me. What do you do? Do you keep every little creation? Do you select a few and hide them away or are you mercenary and chuck them out at the earliest opportunity?
7 thoughts on “What do you do with your children’s old works of art?”
I’ve only got one or two pieces of “artwork” so far, but I can definitely see the sense in rationalising! Sounds like your kids are quite prolific anyway… 🙂
#mmwbh
Prepare for an explosion of creative output when yours start school! My advice is to prepare for frequent rationalising!
I feel so guilty throwing out our kids artwork but if we kept it all we wpuldnt be able to move in the house for bits of paper. I think keeping the best bits is a happy medium. I admire people who record a list of and store every piece of art but if we did that then we would have to rent extra storage. I did read once how a family photograph each piece of their kids work so they a record which again is admirable but time consuming. Parenting…its an emotional minefield!!
Oh I used to keep every single painting, doodle and sketch that was brought home to me and four out of five of mine are in school! So you can image how many we had on our walls, fridge and more. But there does come a time where you do throw out the majority of them and keep the best ones. Like the first one they ever brought home, the Xmas ones etc. We have boxes of drawings/paintings and I cannot wait to look over them when them when they are older!
Thanks for linking up! #MadMidWeekBlogHop
My daughter loves to draw but is only 19 months old so doesn’t care what happens to the finished products! We have a little rotation on the kitchen cupboards and every few weeks I swap them over for new ones, then pop the old ones in the recycling. My parents said when I was a kid and came home with dozens of paintings they used to let me pick one and the rest got recycled so other children could do drawing as well 😉
I’ll remember that line about letting other kids draw! It might just work.
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