Methods for Displaying and Organizing Your Child's Artwork

You often hear that you can't keep all of your child's artwork through the years. Perhaps this is true, but we can rely on these methods to at least keep and organize what you do keep.

We all know the basic mother tested ways to display your child's artwork on the walls of your home, or on the refrigerator, but here's a few ideas that you might not have thought of.

Art Scrapbook

What You Will Need:

A Three - Ring Binder
Top Loading Sheet Protectors
Tape or clear mounting squares

How To Put It Together:

This is a very simple, but extremely effective method to preserve your child's artwork. If you would like the materials to be archival quality, choose the acid free sheet protectors and the clear mounting squares.

Take your three - ring binder and place the top loading sheet protectors inside. Slip your child's artwork into the sheet protectors. If you wish you can add dividers and sort the artwork by medium, year, grade, etc.

You can also use one binder per year, or per holiday. Label the outsides of the binders for ease finding artwork. For the pieces that don't fit, you can either cut them down to size, fold in half inside the sheet protector, or you can store separate in a box or folder.

Home Décor

Some of the best ways to display your child's artwork is as home décor. Either around the entire house, or just in their rooms, the artwork will be a welcome and colorful addition to any room.

Any artwork that has a holiday theme can be brought out during the holidays in lieu of or in addition to store bought decorations.

Christmas Tree Decorations

Smaller artwork, crafts, or artwork intended to be ornaments can be hung on the tree for holidays. This will delight your child and give them pride to see their crafts and work on the tree.

Portfolio Storage

You might find that the majority of the artwork will remain stored in folders, portfolios or boxes.

However, that doesn't mean that you will never be able to see the artwork. If you would like to glance at the artwork on occasion and do not want to unbury or take out the stored artwork read on. Before you store these precious masterpieces, take a photo of them. You can take a photo of each one, or simply those that are your or your child's favorites. You can take a photo album, scrapbook or even a simple three ring binder filled with photo sheets and display the photos you took of their artwork. This will allow you and family to admire your child's creations, but to save space having them readily available to view.

Collage

You can either buy or make a board to hold artwork. There are some that are fairly easy to make with ribbons that hold the photos (or in this case artwork) in place. Alternately, you can buy a simply cork board for display. This is wonderful since it's large enough to hold multiple pieces including the heavier crafts and artwork that might not hang well on the walls. Your child can change out the pieces that are placed on display and rotate with the current favorites.

Frames

Framing your child's artwork can actually be a craft project in itself. Cut out a piece of cardboard or cardstock that is larger than your artwork. I'd suggest no less than a one inch frame all around the artwork. Tape or glue the artwork to the center of the cardboard and allow your child to draw on or decorate the frame. If you would like to reuse the frame for different pieces of artwork use removable tape to secure the artwork to the frame. The artwork will remove easily and without damage allowing a new piece to be hung inside of the frame.

Scrapbooking

With the rising popularity of scrap booking, I felt it was worthy to mention how you can incorporate your child's artwork into scrapbook layouts. You can either use photos of your child's artwork directly in the layouts, or you can scan and make color print outs to use as decorations around your photos. You also can use the actual artwork as your scrapbook "paper" placing the photos on or around the artwork.

Storybook Illustrations

This is a project that would be a great bonding experience between parent and child. Talk to your child about their artwork. If they are rather young and are drawing things that are as of yet undistinguishable to you, ask them to tell you about the picture. What's going on in it. If they respond that it is a dog for example, talk about the dog. Ask what the dog is doing. Maybe what he should do? What's his name? Pull out another piece of artwork and do the same for that. Keep going for several pieces of artwork.

Now, you, the adult can work with what your child told you about their pictures. Make a simple storyline around them. It doesn't have to be fancy, just something fun and cute.

Write it down, type or handwrite, your choice. It's advised that you write in small paragraphs and keep the story relatively short depending on your child's age and attention span. When you are done writing the story out, take a book - either a ring binder and sheet protectors, or a blank scrapbook - and place the artwork in it. Add the text in a place and manner that is pleasing.

Decorate however or if you wish, and cuddle up and read the story to your child. They will delight in seeing their artwork as illustrations, and seeing the story that they helped to create through their discussions with you about the pictures.

As you can see there are several less conventional uses for your child's artwork. Do you have any methods that you use that are unique and interesting?