Next Tuesday (September 3rd) is the first day of school for my little people. I’m excited for them to start a new year but I’m still trying to recover from all the papers that came home with them in the spring and all the art that they created this summer. You can read more about how I coped with the art and created a homework center in
yesterday’s post.
In June I set an aggressive schedule and detailed plan to organize digital photos and the children’s art. I started out pretty strong and got one year of photos organized but then the laptop died and the summer schedule set in with lots of outdoor time which I am glad for. I didn’t want to work on memories and not enjoy memories being made in the present!
My schedule has it set out until February 2014 to get everything organized and caught up with. I am hopeful it won’t take that long but I also wanted to be realistic. I will also likely jump around and already this week my plan for the kids art and schoolwork is to photograph it all and only save a few special pieces. I was inspired by this post by Picklebums.
Here is what I did. I took digital photos of the art and letter work from the dear boy’s Pre-Kindergarten year. I then cropped them on PicMonkey (a free online editing program). Then I saved them in the 2012-2013 digital file.
Here is a sample of the cropped art – I think it turned out really well myself.
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2013 Painted Flowers by T.R. |
I am hoping to catch up on the papers first to both have a sense of physical clean-up and to make room for this year’s school work. I will put all new work into a freezer bag – one designated for each child. Then I’ll continue to work more on the digital files here and there.
I’m already thinking to grade 8 graduations and what I would like to do with all their pre-k to grade 8 art I’ve scanned over the years is make photo-books for their gifts.