Throughout your childs preschool and kindergarten years there will likely be A LOT of different types of artwork coming home. From drawings to paintings to collages and writing, you and your child will want to display this beautiful hard work.  As you may have seen in your child’s classroom, an easy way to display artwork is with a piece of string and clothespins. I always loved hanging work up this way because I could display it in the classroom, then easily take the work down and put new pieces up.

There are a few options you have for how to secure the ends of the string.
1.  You can tie/tape the string to the side frames of a window or doorframe.
2. You can put up two bulletin boards (available on Amazon, these are my favorite) and use pushpins/thumb tacks to secure the two ends
3.  You can get decorative hooks and tie the string on to them.

When hanging your string, make sure both sides are level.  When you initially hang the string, you are going to want it to be quite taught. This way when you begin to hang pieces of work the string will sag slightly making a rounded dip shape.

I like to use regular wooden or plastic clothespins like the ones you use for hanging laundry. You can usually find a 50 pack at any Walmart or dollar store (we love dollar tree).

If you want to spruce up your clothespins a little, check out this great idea from Cityinajar.com on how to make glittery clothespins.

Here are some examples of how I hang work in my classroom.

Here I had large clothespins pushed into the far ends of the bulletin boards.  Then I tied the string around both sides and hung work. Just for reference, this was a poetry exercise where my students wrote about their favorite fruit.

Here the string is barely visible, but it was attached to a large hanging board on either side.  This was a math activity in counting, figuring out how many combinations we could make of each number up to 20.

In a character study of the series book Arthur, I hung up large charts of ideas the students had.  If you can see, most of the charts were created together with my students as you can see their handwriting.

This chart, hung up by clothespins hung in front of a window (can you see the light peeking through behind?), helped give my students sentence starters for when they were writing a book response.

If wanting to show off your child’s work isn’t enough reason to hang it, there are many other benefits as well.  First off, they can feel good about their work because they see you taking the time to display it.   Hanging your child’s writing or artwork also gives them the opportunity to use the print for help when creating new pieces (formation of letters, spelling of words, context).  The fancy teacher name for this environmental print.  Environmental print is the print of everyday life.  It is a perfect entry point for reading/writing beginners as well as for  school aged children to use what they already know and build upon it.

After you have a group of work up for a few weeks, take it down and easily put up another batch.  You could even work together with your child to pick which pieces will be on display.

Do you have any cool ways of hanging your child’s artwork?  If so, let us know!