How do you store your child's work?

[PassTheTwiglets]

Just as the subject title says, really! Do you have folders per project, folders per year... any good suggestions for storage?

short term storage of KidArt is on the walls. When a given masterpiece gets shunted aside, I shove it (along with any other artefacts that we might want to remember about, or which signal educational milestones to those in the know) in one of those 10p supermarket bags on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. When full, such bags are shoved in a pile on a storage shelf in a utility room.

There are HEers on record who have successfully challenged the LA's claims that an education is NOT taking place by simply carting a great pile of boxes of Stuff into the courtroom, with the LA being invited to look through to look for evidence that there is no education going on...

My bags, and their contents, are not sorted by date, nor by child. They are simply a great big heap of history. At some point in the future, the children and/or I might enjoy sorting through the bags. At the moment, they just sit on the shelf as an insurance policy (and a fire hazard, actually!)

"They are simply a great big heap of history"

I like that Ommm
Yes we had those too. We had the loft insulated recently, and several crates came down, made us smile, and went back up.

I've kept them for our enjoyment (ours and the 'kids') not for anyone else, so didn't need any more organising than that.

We have a box file each for artwork and a couple of those expanding folder things with different sections for each 'subject'. This was done in my bid to be more organised just before Christmas, I have no idea how long it will last though

We've just started and DD wants to do all these different projects, which I know will end up unfinished before she gets enthusiastic about the next thing. So I am dreading hundreds of bits of paper floating around all over the place which 'must be kept' (she refuses to throw anything away!) I bought one of those small expanding files for a quid today so that will do for now :)

Banana boxes. I kept all my son's scribbles/writings/drawings in those banana boxes you can get from supermarkets. Stashed on bolt on wall heavy duty plastic shelving from ARgos which I think is meant for garages. Obviously I am someone who favours function over form. I didn't make a distinction between what he wanted to keep and the rest. Or between "finished" and unfinished. Just kept it all. Also kept train tracks up. And lego models.

The junk modelling phase was a bit tiring. Especially where it involved large cardboard. Large home made periscopes painted with flaking emulsion. Ditto full-size puppet theatres. I had a five foot long home made paper chinese lantern here for 3 years till it fell to bits.

For years, my son's idea of a treat was to get a banana box down and look through his stuff with me. This was a bit gruelling because while he could write - in a truly idiosyncratic way with no vowels, stuff written backwards, no spaces etc, he couldn't actually read printed matter, let alone his own creations.

Oh daer Fiona, LOL at the 5 foot chinese lantern! :o

I haven't mentioned the stones we had to keep in case the other stones got lonely...the den made of red velvet curtains strung on guy ropes right across the sitting room...for a year...

Reading this thread shows me that I am clearly cruel and heartless :) (ie I insist on regluarly chucking stuff!)

Mine both have a drawer (ikea wooden drawers) where they keep anything current of their choice. Every month or so I encourage them to consider a clear out. (mainly so there is space to fit new stuff)

We have a box with the best (ie finished) lapbook/file folder stuff. This will eventually need to become 2 boxes.............

Then all current stuff is sort of filed and gets added to. We use school style book bags (the ones that have a gusset - about £5 each from school uniform shop) and cloth bags to store stuff. So there is a bag with the current History project. (so everything to do with our current Vikings work for example). A maths bag (each) a literacy bag (each) Science (together).
I try to go through 'finished' A4 papers and pick out the 'best' bits and package them together for future 'glory' - for them to look at/show off.

Past stuff only gets kept if its really fab. We have been HEing for almost 3 years now so Id guess that in time the volume will increase - but ideally we will still not let it grow too much. I have a thought that an A4 folder (average volume, we dont actually use A4 folders much) per child per school year. But even that tbh will be too much.

There isnt room in our house (or my brain) to keep endless clutter. In fact I tend to go through the house every couple of months getting rid of anything that isnt "beautiful, useful or sentimental".

Betelgeuse, that's a great idea about a digital photo or scan of work! And ThreadWatcher, very good point about storage for current projects as well as past stuff.

(ahem) er... My mantra is "it's the process, not the product." The kids do not always agree.

Keep it on the dining table until I can shove it off under the bed for a quarantine period so they can forget it, then bin. When my older dd has been deeply attached to something, I put it into her room and she moves it around for about a year before admitting that she would be happier without it.

most of ours ends up in the bin eventually. We don't have much in the way of art work. Lots of maths on scraps of paper that get thrown away or used to light the fire. We have school like exercise books for different subjects and they are on a shelf. The biggest problem is the larger scale making things my lot do - including chairs, pedal cars, polystyrene boats, now migrated onto wooden boats (and they don't go in for small - usually 1-2 m long !). One is busily making a scale version of the Titanic (lots of maths going on there !). Most of that is relegated to the shed and (large) garden. I did evict the chairs recently as the dining room was looking like a chair breeding colony .

I keep meaning to takes photos of their masterpieces but somehow never seem to remember.