For Parents:
Keeping your Child's Words and Ideas
Children write, draw, cut and paste wonderful thoughts and ideas. So many in fact and in so many sizes and shapes that it is hard to save them all.
We are far ahead of when my own kids were young and needed storage boxes to get through the year...although if you have space, it is still a wonderful way to keep things. When my kids were growing up, I saved their things for a year and at the end of each school year, we went through their creations and saved their ten favorites (sometimes I added one of my own I couldn't part with, too). So 12 years of school and 120 memories later, they decided what to do with them. But the best reason for keeping their work is that they are often impressed and excited by something they created a year or two before, as in "Wow! That was cool!" It reinforces my own idea that we are our most creative when young. So Fast Forward to today and technology...flash drives and CDs and good cameras on our phones. While I am nostalgic about my grandchildren's creations in physical form, I would now be taking pictures of them and burning them to a cd or a flash drive. When they have screen time they can play with those older images...or eliminate them. Some of those abstract backgrounds done in preschool make great character settings for later by the way. I can almost guarantee they will find things they are still excited by and also see patterns in their stories and art that are unique to them. |