School Photos

My step mom simply put the most recent photo over the previous year's in a frame. So if anyone wanted to look back, all they had to do was take the frame down and look through them. Lol.

They make all kinds of School Days albums that have folders for report card and awards and such, and spaces for school photos and class pictures etc. I found mine on Amazon.

I have a folders for each grade that my children are in at the time and I simply collect different pieces of graded homework, report cards, awards and certificates, artwork, writing essays.....whatever floats my boat at the time! I simply put these items into the labeled folder for whatever grade the kids are in at the time and this keeps a good record of what is going on or examples of how much they have progressed in school.

I found this little thing I have been doing to be a very valuable tool when my oldest twin daughters were applying to college and we had to literally make each of them a high school resume'. What an easy task to do when I simply just grabbed all their high school files by grade and went through all their awards, certificates, report cards, sports awards and varsity letters. I had it all right at my finger tips and was able to create great resume's for them. Give this a try. It requires nothing more than a file for each child and each grade they are in. Fill them up as you go!

I have a framed 8X10 of the kids and I have used them to hang going up our staircase.

Well I know you say you don't "scrapbook" but I find keeping an album the easiest and cheapest way to keep these things organized and put together nicely.
Each year I added the school photo, class photo and any team/sport photos the kids were in. I sometimes added pictures of them with their friends, at classroom parties, on field trips, etc. I also included "firsts" like first drawings, first stories, special awards, certificates, stuff like that.
You don't need to get all crazy with it, I rarely decorated any of it or used all that ridiculous scrapbook stuff, I mostly just cut and pasted the items in the album in chronological order.
It doesn't get much easier than that, and the only expense was the cost of the album itself!

For the annual school photos, a frame like this is nice:

http://www.amazon.com/Picture-Keepsake-Monthly-Collage-Fr...

I do exactly what Kristina M does. (Binder and sheet protectors) The binder also contains class photos and any special awards. My kids will pull out their binders occasionally and their friends often wish they had a binder like that.

Since I tend to be a pack-rat, I had to set limits for myself!! lol! Every year I buy one of those accordian folders that has a string to tie it closed. That way I keep only select items - samples of good (and bad) graded papers; artwork; awards; report cards; photographs, etc. Additionally, I always ask my kids if there is anything particular they want me to keep.

So, now instead of having boxes and boxes of stuff, my kids have a folder for each year.

I've also framed and hung some of their artwork over the years. I love my gallery!!

Good luck!!

My method is simple: get one of those little cheap pocket photo albums and slide the pics you like in. My son has one from my pregnancy with him up until the present day, with lots of pics from preschool in there. It's one of his favorite snuggly things to do-- flip through the photos of himself, cousins, preschool friends, etc.

For saving school pictures that he drew/artwork, consider a binder and buy a box of the plastic binder pages which you can insert paper into. I made little books with these for my preschoolers, which showed a chronological development of their abilities as well as photos mounted on some pages. The sleeves protect the work for later perusing. (Kids do like to do this sometimes.)

I put the old school photos in the frame behind the current one. They're all stacked up in there, nice and safe. No scanning or scrapbooking required.

I buy myself the 8x10's and keep them in a binder with sheet protectors. My sister IS a scrapbooker and when we fly out to see her she takes them and adds them. I am sure this will suffice for now as an organized method of keeping the photos and possibly one day you will meet a scrapbooker willing to create one for you.

I have a bulletin board and I tack up each photo taken by the school in order. I usually get some package that has at least 1-2 3x5's and use those for the bulletin board.
No frames necessary. Everyone loves to look at it and its a large enough that it starts with preschool and we can put photos until high school.

You could scan the photos and make a digital file (with a back up file somewhere else)