What do you do with your kids old school workbooks?

[Crunchymum]

We have no more space! I have several storage boxes of old school books which I should have culled years ago but today is the day.

The guilt is overwhelming though. Can I really recycle years and years worth of my children's learning?

I'm keeping their preschool / reception stuff as they are already in scrapbook format. I'm also keeping awards, certificates and anything personalised etc. It's just the workbooks.

Both the 12yo and 14yo have told me to bin the lot. They have no interest in going through their whole primary school worth of work books and scrap booking anything special.

Practically we need the space these boxes are taking up and we have looked through all this stuff exactly zero times over the year. Yet it just feels so dismissive to throw it all out?

What to do? What do others do?

Recycle or bin
unless somethings very special in the books

I’m almost 40. I’ve long ditched my old school books and don’t regret it at all. I’ve never looked back at them when I had them.

if you didn’t ditch these what would you have to get rid of instead?

The guilt is overwhelming though.

seriously?

Was this really necessary?

I got increasingly less sentimental.as the kids got less cute. Art books and creative writing books are all I've kept.

Somewhere

Bin the lot. No adult gives a toss about their certificates or workbooks from school.

Rip out the clean pages and use them. Keep any particularly special work (like self portraits or creative writing pieces). Bin.

Bin it all! There's no way they'll want this when they're older. Last day of school term I get my kids to go through their books and see if anything they want to keep, v v rarely they do(as in, I have one large shoebox that's half full and they're 9, 11 and 14) and everything else goes in the bin.

Genuine question

It's not uncommon for humans to feel something akin to guilt or sadness when disposing of objects belonging to loved ones, especially things they have created themselves.

You could read up on it if you have never heard of this.

Oh sure I get that.

it was the “overwhelming” I was asking about

I know it’s hard when you’ve kept them for so long but if the children have said they don’t want them and you need the space, it’s really best to get rid of them. Maybe take a page or two for yourself for each child if they’ve written something particularly cute or funny.
Rip the plaster off, just put them all in a bag and take them to the recycling bin. The space is worth so much more than these books that’ll never be looked at again.
Best of luck, you can do this!

I went through them at the end of each year and scanned all the lovely pictures so i have the digital images. Put the originals in the recycling bin as no room.

You could keep a very small selection for memory's sake and dispose of the rest.

It's not unusual to find it a wrench because there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in all that school history, but I agree with others that pretty much everyone has no need for them later, and if the authors were consulted they have made their own choice.

But the loved ones in question don't want this stuff - they've told OP to chuck it all, so what is there to feel guilty about?

Oh leave the OP alone.

Your question was unnecessary, you've had an answer, let it go.

I kept the ones from Reception. All the rest have gone in the recycling the moment term ends.

I wrote 'akin to guilt or sadness' - of course there's no cause for actual guilt.

Some people are more emotional than others, just like some people have a stronger sense of smell.

It's ok to feel things differently, it's ok if it's not a feeling you personally have.

From you yeah

The learning is what they know not what is in your loft.

Right, but OP says she feels "overwhelmingly guilty". I'm asking what she feels guilty about when her children have themselves told her to chuck this stuff.

I genuinely don't understand why she feels the way she does. But then I've never been emotionally attached to stuff.

I threw all of them away without a second thought. They aren’t dead, they are still achieving things and learning stuff as adults.

On the face of it, yes it probably seems a bit pathetic to feel guilty about binning stuff nobody particularly wants or looks at but it was important at some point and it did matter. It's also a very quick and easy measure of how far the older kids have come.

I've now managed to condense x3 storage boxes into 1 by culling everything except Y1 and Y6 main workbooks. I'll revisit them when we next need more storage space I'm sure.

Me too. I think I kept maybe a couple of books of English but that’s it!

Yes people feel differently depending on both nature and nurture.

It blows my mind how some people can be so unaware of human psychology, when we live around so many different people all the time.