What to Do With Everything Your Child Makes
Most homeschool parents end up with a pile of things they don’t quite know what to do with — drawings galore, half-finished notebooks, a clay sculpture that was apparently a dragon family, you name it. It feels wasteful to throw it all away, yet impractical to keep it all. But I truly believe that somewhere in that pile is something of particular value.
A collection of work is different from the portfolio you might already be familiar with. Portfolios are typically assembled for an outside evaluator. They offer “proof” that learning happened, and they’re curated for someone else’s purposes. However, a collection belongs to your child and your family. Think of it less like a showcase of their best work, and more like a record of the full range (the formal or informal experiments, obsessions, things made and abandoned, things made and returned to). You don’t keep it to demonstrate progress to anyone. You keep it to use it.
What to Keep
To keep your collection, use a box, a drawer, a large envelope, or a folder of digital images and documents on your phone. Any of these will do as long as it’s a system that works for you. But when deciding what to keep, there’s a better question worth asking than “Is this finished?” It’s “Does this tell me something, and what might this be telling me?” Many things could answer the first part of that question, such as a page of math showing how their approach has shifted, a letter to a grandparent, a sketch from a nature walk, a photo of an experiment, a voice memo of a song they made up, etc. Patricia Carini, whom I reference in my book, The Joy of Slow, helped develop this practice, and she cast the net wide, listing drawings, paintings, sculpture, sewing, block constructions, stories, poems, reports, photographs — anything a child made or constructed. The variety matters because you’re not curating for quality. You’ll often end up keeping things that later turn out to be the most revealing.
How to Use It
This is where a collection earns its keep, and where it’s different from a bin of things you never look at again. Every few weeks, when you can, pull it out and spend some time with it with your child. Look together and notice things like what your child has returned to on their own and what themes or subjects keep appearing. Recurring images, formats, or questions often point toward an interest that can be followed.
When my daughter was younger, we pulled out her collection, looking for ideas for a new project. Going through a stack of her paintings, she noticed how often she’d painted nature scenes. Her eyes lit up as she remembered wanting to know more about birds. The next day, her dad serendipitously found a bird’s nest in a potted plant outside our front door. What followed was months of bird feeders, birding journals, birdhouse construction, clay birds, bird stories, and a hand-drawn field guide. The collection didn’t cause any of that, but it opened the door.
Sitting down with recent work is also one of the more underrated practices in homeschooling. Spread a few things out and ask questions about what felt hard, what your child would do differently, or what they’re proud of. Children who learn to talk about their own work (what they were trying, where they got stuck, what they’re thinking about their process) develop a kind of self-awareness that carries into harder learning later.
What it Shows You Over Time
Month-to-month or day-to-day, growth can sometimes be hard to see. Looking back six months, it tends to become more obvious, not just in what your child can do or what skills they acquired, but also in how they think, what they care about, and how they handle difficulty. A collection makes it easy to focus on how far they’ve come rather than just how far they still have to go toward some standard they might or might not have helped create. That shift in perspective is, in the end, what makes keeping a collection worth the trouble.
