What to do with all that school stuff?

Connie has been bugging me to write about my school albums. I started doing this for my children in preschool. I get tired of all that paper & artwork that comes home from school. The kids put time into and I hate to throw it away. But I just can’t keep it all. So I came up with a solution. A digitally scrapped photo book of the school year.

When they were real young, I took pictures of their artwork and scrapped the pictures. Then saved a few pieces of their artwork and stored them in big folders.

Then they started school and I soon had class pictures, certificates, art work, homework, etc. You KNOW what I am talking about if you have kids. So over the year, I collect all this information into one big pile. At the end of the year, I sort through the work and I will talk more about the sorting process later. Once I sort through the work, I scan in the selected pieces. I then scrap all the information, keeping it simple. Send it off to my favorite photo book printer. Then in the mail, I receive a bound book containing my child’s school year. It takes up a lot less room than if I saved all those papers!

How long does it take? Probably about 15 – 20 hours for me to do a book but my children love getting their books out and paging through them.

So I am going to do a blog series on how to create these types of books and tips/hints on doing it.

Some initial pointers:

• Save all school stuff in one place. This makes that job of sorting so much easier. If it’s too large, take a picture of it and save those pictures in one place. I save mine on the computer in a digital folder called the child’s name & school year.
• Keep the digitally scrapbooked pages simple! My son’s latest book was 46 pages long. If you don’t keep them simple, you will never finish it. The point of the book is to showcase your child’s work!

And now for some examples of what I am talking about:

A 3rd grade book

A Kindergarten book

A Preschool book

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