<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Hi Paula: It&amp;#039;s only midway through the school year and I am drowning in artwork. I want to save my kids&amp;#039; drawings as keepsakes but there are so many of them. Two kids times twelve years of school equals help! \u2013traci  Traci, you&amp;#039;ve hit on reason #2,394,752 to be glad we&amp;#039;re raising kids in a digital age. Unlike, say, our moms, we can save our kids&amp;#039; entire educational archive \u2014 artwork, homework, permission slips, report cards, et. a. \u2014 should we be inclined to yoke ourselves to the scanner long after the rest of the clan has gone to bed. Or, of course, we can digitally scan and save just the select masterpieces. (That&amp;#039;s my pick, though I wish I&amp;#039;d thought of it earlier.) More art-saving advice:  File and cull. One way to deal with the piles is to deal just once a year. Buy a big artist&amp;#039;s portfolio and toss in all the paintings and potato-prints all year long. Then one boring summer&amp;#039;s day, go through the entire folio together, agreeing to save the 10 or 20 best works. Be sure to write the grade on the back. Bonus: Over the years. you wind up with a wonderful archive of your child&amp;#039;s artistic development.   Frame the faves. You can buy inexpensive frames and rotate the artwork on display. Makes a child feel great and perks up your hallway, too. Make artwork into gifts. Foto websites are full of options for making calendars, mugs, plates, pillowcases \u2013 everything a lucky Grandma could dream of. Once you have the goods, you can guiltlessly ditch the originals. Whatever you do, don&amp;#039;t let &amp;#039;em see you toss. I tend to set homework and artwork aside, make sure both parents have viewed it, and then let the excess bits (i.e. most of it) gently drift into the middle of a pile of newspapers and other recycling-bound papers. (&amp;quot;Middle&amp;quot; being a key word there, as in unseen.) They know I can&amp;#039;t possibly save everything, but it&amp;#039;s nevertheless a bit bruising to see your crayon portrait splattered with the tossed-out spaghetti sauce in the trash.  \u2013Paula Spencer, WD &amp;quot;Momfidence&amp;quot; columnist "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/life/a42533/my-childs-artwork-save-it-or-toss-it-3466/>