Strollerderby

Well, most of ours goes straight into recycling. I mean, over the next 13 years, that's going to amount to A LOT of construction paper if we kept it all!

I keep the ones that seem like a lot of work and care went into them.

I also keep the ones my daughter finds in the recycling box and asks why it's there - oops!

When my DS was in preschool, I took digital pictures of all his projects, and just saved a few of them.

I don't keep the homework worksheets that come home from elementary school, but hold onto projects at least until I get around to doing another session of digital pictures - then i will weed extensively!

I recently returned to my childhood home and had to go through 20+ years of crayon art, spelling tests, macaroni masterpieces, and more angst ridden teenage poetry than I care to admit.

I chucked 99.9% of it...and I could hear my mother's heart breaking. All that stuff was for her...she had the memories associated with all of it...not me.  

So I am just keeping the best of the best in an oversized boot shoebox and recycling the rest. Then maybe when Amelia is older I'll be able to tell her the story behind each one instead of just having a mountain of kindling.

I'm with Dana.  I let a pile build up on the shelf and when it gets too full I pull out the really good or clever ones and recycle the rest (after she goes to bed).  

I tried the digital picture thing as well as scanning them and it just isn't the same...plus it takes up space on my hard drive.

I do frame the really awesome pieces and hang in our "art corner".  Then we swap them out when new ones come along.

In the early years of preschool my daughter would destroy her creations in the car on the way home. Her teacher said "it's all part of the process." So most of her work got tossed.

Now my daughter considers herself an artist. She has a "studio" in the corner of our living room and I've given her gallery space that she manages herself. I used blue painter's tape to mask off two big squares of wall for her creations. She can't display anything anywhere else in the house. Really she doesn't want to keep much. It's still all about the process of creating for her vs the end product.

Yup, I keep most of it during the school year (that's when I get the most), and clean it out once a year.  I keep the neatest stuff, and the stuff with meaning to me, and the rest sneaks out in the night.  :)  

I cannot imagine keeping it all.  We have a very convenient recycling bin in the garage.   Some that are particularly cute go to grandparents or in a keeper box.  But that's probably something like .5% of the total output.

Wow.  I JUST saw a great solution to this problem.  At an 'in home boutique' I went to just this weekend I saw this woman's business "See Jack Draw"  seejackdraw.blogspot.com

She does this amazing service where she takes gorgeous (and really well framed) photos of your kids art, lays it out with a title tile and a photo of your kid and prints it out.  It looks fantastic and is a great way to preserve some of the art without having it overtake your life. (makes a great grandparent gift too).

this really isn't my business or anything, but I JUST ran across it and thought it was an amazing idea.

If I kept every drawing and art project, we would have run out of room in the house by now, and that's not hyperbole. I just keep the ones that are unusual or that show a jump in skill, or that she obviously put a lot of care and effort into. Otherwise, they get chucked at the end of the day, and she doesn't notice.