Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Displaying Kid's Artwork

I'll admit it, my fridge is crazy full with magnets and papers. There is very little white space.

The side is mostly full of magnets - I must have over 100 magnets on the side of the refrigerator. Many are very useful business cards, but they add up. Many are picture frames. Some are simply souvenirs from trips long ago.

The front of the fridge is where we keep the school calendars, lunch calendars, and newsletters. In addition, this is where the kids proudly display their artwork. It used to be that there were so many pieces of artwork that they would find that the magnet wasn't strong enough to work through the stack of papers. I wanted a solution for hanging their artwork that was neater and still allowed guests to view it all.

Here is what we came up with:

We started with a piece of cardboard and cut it in half. The back of a pad of paper can work nice. Using a hole punch, we punched three holes in the cardboard to align with the holes in a sheet protector. Using three rings, we attached a stack of about 6 page protectors to each piece of cardboard. Then, we used a magnetic clip to attach it to our refrigerator. The kids were each allowed to decorate the cardboard portion of their hanger. Now, when they do new artwork, they can simply slide it into one of the sleeves. Changing pages or flipping through the artwork is easier and I have more white space on the front of the refrigerator (although, many would tell you it is still rather full!).

In addition, the sleeve protectors can easily be moved to three ring binder that we had previously set up to hold favorite artwork and new ones added to the refrigerator.

This works for me!



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow ! Nice idea ! Looks really nice. Yes, my fridge looked the same .

Diane said...

I like the fact that the artwork stays neat and clean in the plastic sleeves. I'm thinking that a calender would make a good project also.