Organizing Projects and Artwork

I swore I would never throw away any of my kids' artwork.  When I was little, I drew a picture in art class and had it ripped up in front of the whole class.  I was devastated and since then, have kept all of my own artwork as well as each piece of paper either of the girls has ever scribbled on.  Well, if you follow me on Facebook, you already know my obsession with the show, Hoarders.  I do not want to become a hoarder of scribble pictures so I found the perfect solution!  All you need is a plastic file box for each kid and some hanging file folders!  Oh, and the stack of random crap that MUST be saved. 

That is not my whole stack.  That is what was easy for me to grab without sorting through stuff first!

I gave each girl their own box full of hanging folders.

I labeled each folder by age and then school year from "age 1 and under" to "grade 12."

Woops... need some more folders!

Then, on the front of each folder, I wrote what years were in that folder.  You could also write important dates to remember on the front of the folder, if you want!

Finally, go through the mountains of papers you saved and sort them into the correct folders!

Now, I can only save enough stuff to fill the folder.  If it is full and there is something that I absolutely HAVE to save, I need to throw something else out.  Pretty perfect, right?  The only exception is larger things that don't fit into the folder.  What I plan to do for these are, take a picture of the artist holding her project and put that into the folder.

Just looking at these makes me smile :o)

Linking this idea to my favorite linky parties.