Every house with a child has one: the pile. Colored sheets on top of the microwave, stuck to the fridge until the magnet gives up, stashed in a drawer nobody opens. Throwing them out feels awful, keeping them all is impossible.
Ten destinations better than the drawer
- Wrapping paper. Wrap a cousin's birthday present in the page your child colored. It looks great and they become part of the gift.
- A card. Fold it in half, write inside, send it to grandma. Grandmas keep those forever.
- Bookmark. Cut a strip about an inch wide. It becomes the bookmark for the book you're reading together.
- Memory game. Print the same page twice, color both the same, glue to cardboard and cut out.
- Jigsaw puzzle. Glue to a cereal box and cut into six or eight pieces. Little kids love rebuilding their own drawing.
- Mobile. Cut out the characters, punch a hole, hang them on string in the window.
- Notebook cover. Glue the drawing to the cover and run wide tape over it to protect it.
- String gallery. Stretch a string across a wall and hang pages with clothespins. Easy to swap, no holes in the wall.
- Year album. A folder with plastic sleeves, one page per month. By December you can watch the line change, it's striking.
- Photograph and recycle. Snap the page, keep the photo in a phone album, and recycle the paper guilt-free.
The conversation that makes the difference
Before deciding, ask: «which of these do you want to keep?» Let your child pick three. The rest go to the uses above or to recycling, and they were part of the decision. That teaches choosing what matters, a skill that goes far beyond paper.
When you run out
If the pile has shrunk and your child wants more, you can download and print more free pages any time, there are 239 in the collection, enough never to repeat one.
