Curating Kids' Keepsakes
As the school year comes close to winding down, many of us are facing the inevitable end of year schoolwork infiltration of our homes. All of that artwork their teachers have been displaying on the classroom bulletin boards is coming home along with everything that had found a home in their desk, backpack, or locker all year. As you sort through the hoards of papers and projects that they dump on your kitchen counter, it might be helpful for you to face this task with the framework of Curating Keepsakes. We’ve talked before about the importance of not keeping every single thing, like in last month’s blog on Treasure Reverence, but that can be hard to accomplish when you are a particularly sentimental person and so much of what they bring home feels meaningful to you. We’re never going to tell you what to toss and what to keep (except for those baby teeth - toss toss toss), but perhaps you could use a little guidance to help you be a little more selective so the truly meaningful items can shine.
While Treasure Reverence can be applied to all sorts of things in your home such as collections, heirlooms, or even your wardrobe, today we’re really honing in on the items children bring into the home from school and extra curricular activities, which tends to largely be papers and small projects. It can be challenging, especially in the early school years, to decipher what is worth holding onto when there’s a firehose of papers coming home every day. You’ll have to decide for yourself what is meaningful to keep, but I’d like to encourage you to be incredibly choosy with this process. Your child will likely bring home multiple handprint projects in those preschool and early elementary years, so hanging onto just one each year should be plenty - you don’t need 5 handprints from pre-k! They’ll also likely write their name on tons of papers throughout the year, so I like to hang onto just the ones that show a new phase of development. We’re big fans of holding onto the little questionnaires they often do at school when they’re Student of the Week or as a Mother’s Day gift, and any meaningful achievement or award such as a kindness certificate or a little medal from their running club. In our home, report cards and perfect attendance awards don’t make the cut because I don’t attribute a lot of meaning to what they represent, but as always, you get to make that call for yourself. To help cull through the papers, I like to ask myself questions like, “Does this item represent a specific moment in time/phase of development for my child?” “Was this truly made by my child or was it primarily made by their teacher?” And “Will my child want this/care about this one day in the future?”
It can be an overwhelming challenge to begin the curation process if you’ve previously been holding onto more keepsakes than you’d prefer. If you have a lot to go through, set aside some time, maybe with a friend (see our post on Body Doubling for tips), to sort through everything. Once you’ve dedicated a few hours to going through what you’ve already collected, it’s much easier to maintain weekly or even daily as more papers enter your home. I also like to get our memory boxes out once a year for the kids to look through, and it always ends up being a bit of a purging session. There are many occasions when my children will make art at home or at school and ask me to keep it in their memory box, which I always do. However, as time goes by, they often see less value in that art (sometimes they ask me, “why did I want to keep this?!”) and they decide to toss it. It’s a great practice for them to be involved in so they can learn the skill of curation alongside you. It’s best to not involve the kids in your initial purging process, but once you’ve started a more manageable collection, they can often weed out things that were once special to them and no longer are.
Once you’ve settled on what you’re keeping and what you’re letting go of, it’s important to store these keepsakes properly. If they are important enough to hang onto, they’re important enough to keep nice! We like streamline boxes with lids such as these scrapbook storage boxes for this. You’ll likely need multiple boxes for each of your children, but they stack nicely and are attractive enough to keep in an accessible, visible place. If you’re planning to store the keepsakes somewhere less visible like a closet or attic, you could go with something else, like these great plastic lidded bins.
If you’d like a little more in-depth training on this topic, Tara’s Curating Kids’ Keepsakes course is evergreen on the House Peace website, and we’re always here to answer a quick question in our DMs on Instagram.
Happy curating!
— Colleen
PS. You can get to know me and my family a little more here!
*Affiliate links are included in this blog post, and as a consumer, you will not pay more or less by clicking on an affiliate link. A small percentage of sales by affiliate links go back to us as content creators, and help us provide you with resources such as this blog post.