A curriculum filled with opportunities for art and creativity boosts a child’s narrative and writing skills, strengthens vocabulary, and engages the brain in higher-level thinking such as questioning, generating ideas, and problem solving. But more importantly, an art-filled education that is child-led brings joy, and develops skills that worksheets and formalized schooling can’t teach.

A creative invitation is a simple set-up with a few appealing or interesting materials that spark your child’s curiosity and invite them over to create and explore.

Children love painting on an easel. Painting in a vertical position is also important for building arm and wrist strength, developing spatial awareness, engaging the core, crossing the midline, and more.

We cannot save everything our child makes, but they are only four once, and their drawings and paintings at these young ages are a record of their growth. Saving their art inevitably means implementing a sorting and storing system. Here are three tried-and-true storage ideas that we know will work.