In my last post I talked about getting together the basic items needed to start albums for a new school year. In this post I’m going to walk through my process for going through all of the stuff your kiddos bring home and how to keep up throughout the school year.
I am going to start by admitting that I didn’t always have this school album business under control. At one time I had about 5 years worth of preschool art and the beginnings of elementary school work that was piled high up in my daughter’s closet. I just kept tossing things on top of it but it was taking up valuable space for storage and it was a mess. When I went to my scrapbook retreat in January 2013, I vowed to fix this problem. So I threw everything into two bins and loaded them in my car with all of my other crop supplies and set to work.
I was able to cull through the two bins, throwing away things that seemed pretty run of the mill (I know every piece is special but some are more or less special than others) and taking photos of pieces that were two big to fit in a binder. I was then down to two relatively small piles of papers which contained preschool pieces where Ava was asked questions to answer or if a piece had her hand and footprints, that sort of thing. Her elementary school work reflected growth throughout the year, her handwriting, stories and art pieces. I also include pictures from school events and activities both at school and outside of school because these are specific to each child.
I have decorated some pages a little more than others. The photo pages are often the ones where I slip in some scrapbook paper or cards to fill the gaps and dress it up a bit. I do not do this through the whole album though. For the school papers, I often just slip them in the page protectors or adhere smaller items to a sheet of cardstock. Art pieces that are too large for the binder, are photographed as I mentioned above and then put into a collage and printed as an 8×10. I use Walmart for my collages as it is a quick and easy process and lets me try different layouts until I get the one I like best.
The point is to keep this simple so that I can keep up. Throughout the year, school work just gets slipped in to the binder and at the end I make sure I have prints of all the photos that I want to include.
I hope this helps some of you to keep up with this process if you’re wanting to make school albums for your kids. Is there something you do to document the school years? Please share it with us, we’d love to hear more about your process.
