School memory project

Need family lockdown self-quarantine isolation ideas?

Kill two birds with one stone and occupy the children whilst also organising the piles and piles of your child’s school artwork and projects!!

You know those MASSIVE packs of arts and crafts that your kids come home with each half term? What do you do with them?? Keep everything? Upload to an app?

I keep a folder for each child and each year I add a few pages to it to showcase their achievements and artwork.

Obviously there is life outside school, and that’s what photo albums are for (google for a million ideas). This project is more about academic life and education.

• I’m a realist, this is only going to happen once a year, so until then I have a ‘school cupboard’ at home where everything of vague importance gets stuffed.
• Get one 160 page presentation folder for each child. You then have around 10 pages per year of school.
• Every year (usually in Sept once the kids are back at school, but can be done whenever), I go through everything and make 4 piles per child:
  1) 2-3 pieces of favourite A4 art work (note I said favourite, not best!)
  2) 2-3 pieces of favourite class work (could be from any subject, a poem, zig zag lines, creative writing or even maths work, but I try to include things that show hard work, a developmental leap, or just something particularly sweet or heartfelt)
  3) Other artwork that I still want to keep (6-12 pieces per half term) & class workbooks.
  4) Throwing out pile.

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I have to be brutal to sort into these piles. It’s hard.

If you’re doing this with your child, they love looking at their old work and often tell you interesting stories about doing it. Probably best to combine piles 3&4 until they’re not around, though…

• Art and workbooks from pile 3 get parcelled up with ribbon so there’s one parcel per year, and stored back in the school cupboard.
• I then add the following to each child’s school folder so it takes up about 10 pages:
  > School photos (individual, sibling & class)
  > Achievement certificates (gymnastics, well done class cards, tennis courses, etc)
  > Child’s individual Christmas card & matching artwork (if your school organises that for the children each year)
  > Favourite art work and class work (piles 1 & 2, see above)
  > End of year school report

It gets harder every year to limit myself just just a few favourites, but when they’re 18 I can give them this folder and it’s a capsule of their entire education.

They aren’t going to take boxes of 10 year old art work and paper maché snowmen to university or to their first flat, but one folder seems like something they could genuinely have as a keepsake and not throw out.