How To Make Photo Books For Kids Art

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If you are anything like me, you love to encourage your children to create. But, all the paper and projects laying around drives you crazy! Creating is a BIG thing at our house. We even have a Creation Station. The conflict of wanting to instill creativity but not wanting clutter everywhere led me to the idea to make photo books for my kids’ art.

After sharing what I’ve done with other mommas and receiving their reactions, I needed to share it here with all of you!

How To Make Photo Books For Kids Art!

• Label the project! Once a project is completed or brought home, simply say, “Tell me about this…”. This simple question allows your child to truly share with you what they want about the piece, instead of just answering leading questions. On the back of the project write the date and your child’s response. If your child is young and doesn’t speak grammatically correct you can decide to correct it or keep it as is. I enjoy keeping it exactly like they say it to savor their age and personality.
• Collect the projects. I like to designate one folder or box (if they are creating 3D projects) each month. I collect anything laying around, on the fridge, or in drawers at the end of each month to add it to the box. Keeping them in chronological order helps later.   
• Take photos of all the projects. You could do this each month. However, I collect all year and take all the photos at once. This allows them to be all in one place and in order on my camera. I also find since more time has passed my girls are more willing to let go of things.
• Load images. Next you want to load the images into your preferred photo book company’s website or app, to actually start making the photo books for your kid’s art. I enjoy using Shutterfly Photo Books and have signed up for their emails/texts. Typically, I will create a book and then wait for a coupon code to come through. I have also used my Pamper Rewards to get a book, or have bought a Groupon for a $5 book. If you stored the art and took pictures in chronological order, this part of the process should be quick. Depending on your budget and/or  how many pages you want the book to be, you can choose to have one photo per page or do collages on some pages.
• Add captions. This is what you do with those cute things you wrote on the back of each project that your kiddo told you! Add a caption under the photos. If I didn’t get captions on everything I create a collage page with no captions.
• Add other photos if desired. If you want to add photos of other things feel free. When my girls were in public school I added photos of school parties, performances, birthday parties with classmates and such. I felt like this gave a nice round look at the complete school year. 
• Enjoy the book. Let your kids look through the book and enjoy it together. I prefer to keep these put away regularly so they stay in good shape. But they ask to get them down at certain times so they can look through them. If you do one each school or calendar year, they end up with a collection rather quickly! Going back to look through the previous years is fun too!
• Release, recycle or gift original projects. Now that you have all the projects recorded in your beautiful handy book you can get rid of the actual papers and projects. If it’s just hard to trash certain things they created, we will then decide to give them to grandparents, family friends, teachers at school/church/gym, or older neighbors. They have all been blessed with my girls’ creations! Those people may not keep the creations, but they generally are happy that they were thought of. For some older folks it really does bring a lot of joy to their day! 

Now that I have started making photo books for the kid’s art we are able to enjoy all the creating! We get to create together, enjoy the projects, save them for memories and then bless someone else with them. Creating art books like this will allow our kids to enjoy their projects for years to come without sending them totes upon totes full of old papers and projects when they move out of the house. Try this project for the stack of art you have from last year and see how much more you can enjoy it when it’s all in one place on the bookshelf. 

Leave a comment letting me know if you plan to make a photo book for your child’s art. 

Until Next Time- Truly Love, 

Cassie