My youngest came home from Kita on Thursday with a bag. Not a backpack. A bag. The kind you bring back from Ikea. Inside: 11 paintings, a collage made from pasta and tissue paper, two drawings of our apartment building that looked like Minecraft screenshots. Plus what I can only describe as an enthusiastic smear of purple on cardboard.
That’s one week.
Why Kita generates this much art
If you’re not sure where all of this is coming from, the answer is intentional. Good Kita programs are built around process, not product. The 4-year-old isn’t trying to make a painting. She’s exploring what happens when red and yellow touch each other. The physical act of making is the whole point. The output is almost incidental.
This is good pedagogy. It’s also why you end up with 11 paintings in one week.
Swiss Kitas lean into this especially hard. There’s an arc to the year: the Laternenumzüge in autumn, the winter craft season, the spring projects that pick up when the weather turns. Each season generates its own category of paper. By April you’ve collected one of each.
The volume isn’t a mistake. It’s evidence that something real is happening.
The question nobody tells you to ask
For the first year, I treated the art like mail. Open it, feel vaguely guilty, stack it on the table. Eventually: triage. Some kept, most released.
What I didn’t think to ask: what will I wish I had, in ten years?
My older one is in primary school now. He draws differently. The proportions are better. He puts thought into what he wants to draw before he starts. That’s good. But the drawings from when he was four (the ones where people have three arms and the sun is inside the house) are mostly gone. I didn’t photograph them regularly. I didn’t realize the window would close that fast.
What the art actually is
A toddler’s drawing isn’t art in the gallery sense. It’s documentation. It shows you exactly who your child was at a specific age, with evidence: the pressure of their hand, their color choices, what they named things.
My younger one calls all animals “dog.” You can see it in every drawing from this year. Every drawing has a dog in it. Some of them are horses.
This won’t last. In six months he’ll know a horse from a dog. The all-dog phase will close, and there will be no record that it happened, unless the drawings are somewhere findable.
I’m not being sentimental. I’m being practical. These are primary sources.
What you should do tonight
You don’t need to keep all of it. That’s not the point.
What’s worth doing: photograph the new pieces while they’re fresh. Not to archive every drawing forever. Just to have the option later. The ones that will matter are obvious in hindsight; they’re not always obvious in the moment. If you’ve photographed them, you can decide later. If you haven’t, the choice is already made.
Photography takes about 30 seconds per drawing if you’re not fussing with it. Lay the drawing on the floor, decent light, one photo. Move on.
If you want the background removed (so it’s just the drawing, not your kitchen floor): I built an app for that. It’s called Scribbly. It photographs the art, removes the background automatically, and organizes everything by child. Free, with print products available. And I’m the founder, so full disclosure applies.
The app is optional. The photograph is not.
What to do with the physical pile
I covered this in a separate guide. Short version: keep about 10% as originals, let go of the rest without guilt. The drawing in the recycling bin isn’t lost if it’s photographed. It just lives somewhere else.
For the end-of-year bag from Kita (the all-at-once dump), there’s a piece on handling that too.
The bag is its own thing. But the weekly flow just requires a habit: photograph before it goes into the pile.
The part I didn’t expect
I thought photographing my kids’ art was about preservation. Not losing things.
That’s true, but it’s not the main thing.
The main thing is looking. When you photograph a drawing, you actually look at it. You notice what your 3-year-old put in the corner: the small cat you almost missed. You see that this week’s drawings are different from last week’s in some way you can’t quite name. You hold the drawing up to the light.
You were going to drop it on the pile. Instead you spent 30 seconds with it.
The archive is just proof you were paying attention.
FAQ
My child brings home so much Kita art I can’t keep up. Is there a faster system?
Photograph before you sort. Once you have a digital copy, the decision to keep or release the original is low-stakes. The pile stops being a problem when you stop seeing the physical pieces as the only record.
Which pieces from Kita are worth keeping as originals?
Milestone pieces: first time they wrote their name, last Kita day, a piece they spent real effort on. And anything that captures something specific to this age. Not the fifth rainbow of the week. Unless it’s the best rainbow.
How do I organize all the digital photos of kids’ art without mixing them into my camera roll?
The main trap is letting art photos live among thousands of other photos. Either use a dedicated app organized by child and date, or create a separate photo album and be consistent about adding to it. The organization matters more as the volume grows.
