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    How to Preserve and Store Your Child’s Artwork

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    Children are constantly coming home with a new art project they’ve created.  While these52154011-ma masterpieces are near and dear to every parent’s heart, they can clutter up your home become a messy pile of paintings.  Or they may end up as a jumbled assemblage of papers stored on your fridge.  Wouldn’t you like a way to compile these creations into an organized collection that you can both display and store for years to come?  Here are a few ideas.

    Before you begin, you may want to choose only your favorites to save.  Or let your child choose.  This will result in an art collection spanning their childhood composed of treasured pieces, rather than every page ever brought home.  One thing recommended by many professionals is to have a back up.  Before you discard anything, consider scanning it into a computer.  Keeping scanned images is a great way to preserve things without the added bulk of storing the actual project.

    The first step in preserving artwork is to decide how you’d like it protected.  Sliding designs into page protectors lets you switch them out as needed.  Sheet protectors come in varying thicknesses.  Be sure you choose archival quality so the items won’t fade or yellow with age.

    For long term protection, we recommend lamination.  Now before you start thinking that a laminator is more expensive than page protectors, keep reading.  While the initial investment of a laminator may cost more than a box of sheet protectors, you can get a decent machine for less than $40.00 that will cover both letter and legal size items as well as numerous smaller things. For just a little bit more, you can find a quality Fellowes laminator that will accommodate pages as large as 11″ x 17″, which is often the size of children’s art.  The protection offered by lamination as well as the versatility in size makes it a worthy investment.

    Once protected, decide how you want to store these items.  If you’ve chosen to put everything into page protectors, you can easily arrange these in a three ring binder.  Putting them in order of their creation date will give you a timeline of your child’s progress.  A smaller binder could be used for each individual year while a larger binder could store multiple years separated by index tabs.

    Laminated creations can be stored a number of different ways.  You can purchase large folders specifically designed for saving wider pieces of artwork created by your little one.  Some people keep pictures in a box or scrapbook.  Or you could bind them together in a book.  A plastic comb binding machine is another inexpensive tool that you can use to save things.  Many of these smaller devices offer a built in manual punch.  This is another way to preserve creations year by year.

    Using these suggestions, you’ll be able to effectively store the masterpieces created by your children without giving up the front of your refrigerator.  And they’ll appreciate the compact storage and the time you put into it more than they would a box full of colored pictures.  Getting a start on this while your kids are young will help keep you organized for years to come.

    School Projects – Creating Books

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    Creating books in class is a fun and engaging class project, and gives your students something they can keep forever. Here are a few tips on how to get started.

    Picking a Theme:

    Before you get to putting a book together, the first thing you will have to decide is what you want your students’ books to be about. Fortunately, there pretty much countless projects in just about all of the major disciplines that you can successfully create books around. In the English department, for instance, you can put together books of your students’ writing work, either individually or collectively. Your history class can create a book about a major event such as the Civil War. Even the science-based classes can make books out of field studies and findings from various experiments the class has undertaken.

    Gathering Your Material:

    As mentioned above, there are at least a couple of different ways to go about putting your book together. For instance, your book can either represent the work of the whole class, or of each individual student. In the former case, you can assign various tasks to each student that will represent his or her contribution to the final product. This is a great way to impart the lesson of working together to create something of value, and of setting and meeting deadlines. You can also create a separate book for each individual student that represents his or her work throughout the school year, or for a particular learning section. Some other options include creating department-wide books, such as cookbooks for home economics classes, poems and stories from the creative writing classes, drawings and paintings from the art department, and the list goes on.

    The Project:

    When you are putting your book together, unless you intend the books to be your own project as, for instance, surprise gifts to your students, it will provide them a great learning experience if they are involved in every aspect of the work from inspiration, to creation, to the finished product. If your class were to, say, take a vote on what kind of book they would like to create, it stands to reason that they will be more engaged in the process and be more likely to follow through.

    Just like with any book, there should be a good mix of text and graphics. If it is some kind of science or business study, for instance, there should be at least some photographs and/or charts and graphs.

    For younger students, you may want to create a template that each student can work with, such as a place to put a photo, and lines to fill in.

    Printing and Binding Options:

    There are numerous options, of course, but if you are using color in your graphics, you will want to use a color printer if your school has one. As far as binding, you can take a look at what kinds of machines your school has on hand. Chances are there will be a plastic comb binding machine, or perhaps even spiral coil unit. These are both great options and very useful to have around, so if your school is lacking one, it might be a good thing to request. You might also check with your library to see if they have a thermal binding machine. These machines can create hardcover books in a matter of minutes, and are very inexpensive.

    Putting Together a Class Directory

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    Making a class directory for your child’s school can be a fun project, and the finished productmartin-yale-bm101-sm12-ma is something that other parents will greatly appreciate. Here are a few tips on how to put together a great class directory.

    1. Get Permission. If you are a parent who has decided to put together a class directory for your child’s school or class, it is important that you get the permission of school authorities before you begin compiling your information. Chances are, if no one at the school has taken on that task yet, they will likely be very grateful that someone is doing it, and will help you in any way they can. This will not only make the job much easier, it will make it a lot more fun as well.

    2. Decide on The Scope. Are you going to create a directory for the whole school? The whole grade? Just the classes your child or children are in? You will have to decide on this, of course, as well as whatever other information you would like to include. It might be fun to have teachers and staff provide short bios, or to have other interesting information like trivia tidbits about the school’s history or a list of famous people who attended the school in years past.

    3. Gather Your Info. One easy way to do this is to give teachers sheets of paper to hand out, and for the students to take home, asking for names, numbers, birthdays, and whatever other information you would like to have included. It is important to realize from the outset that you are not going to get 100% participation from parents in this regard, and that you must respect the wishes of those who do not want their contact information listed. In these cases, find out if it is all right to simply list the student’s name.

    4. Put it All Together. Once you have the papers in hand of all who are going to participate, you can start entering sorting the information into your word processing software. It is probably best and easiest to list each class room separately, put the teacher’s names and information first and in bold, and to list the rest of the students alphabetically by first or last name after that. If you are including administrators and other staff’s information, you can put that in the front of the directory. Once you put all this together, you can decide on a cover. If the school has a logo, see if you can get hold of a digital version of it. It might also be fun to include little bits of clip art throughout the booklet.

    5. Bind It. For larger projects and schools, you can take a look at binding styles such as plastic comb binding or spiral coil. The schools might even have these types of machines on hand for you to use. For smaller directories, you can use booklets makers that place two staples in the center of the documents. Again, there may be a chance that your school has these and will allow you to use them. A lot of these types of machines are relatively inexpensive to own, and can be used at home for future projects as well.