My daughter’s backpack is always filled to the brim with paintings, pictures, and doodles that I can’t bring myself to toss. Rather than tuck them away to collect dust, I’m putting them to good use this holiday season — let’s face it, we can only keep so many! We’re using her lil masterpieces — including completed coloring book pages — to wrap small gifts. Tucking the artwork around books, videos, and boxes, we’ll showcase her artistic talents for all to enjoy! We also added a bit of sparkle by wrapping bows around the goodies with a steady hand and a glitter glue pen. While this homade paper costs pennies, the pictures are priceless!

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It’s only natural for parents to think every scribble or brush stroke their child creates is a masterpiece, but if you are anything like me that means you have stacks of masterpieces you don’t know how to archive for safekeeping. A company called inkubook can help you create a classic bound book of art and photo memories that will give all those creations a worthy home. All you have to do is scan the pages, save them as a jpg, png, or gif file and upload them to the inkubook website.Prices start at $14 for a 20-page softcover book and $25 for a hardcover, but playing around with the book design on the site is free. It also offers a great volume pricing option, which is perfect if you want to make books to give as gifts for the holidays!

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From Green Eggs and Ham to To Kill a Mockingbird, kids seem to pick the classics when it’s time to read, according to a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children nationwide.

Dr. Seuss’s book was the most popular choice among first graders, Renaissance Learning found. The company, which looked at kids in 9,800 schools for the study, manages a program in which students take computerized reading comprehension quizzes. Students earn points based on the book’s word difficulty, word length, sentence length, and total number of words. Many schools even award prizes to students for their efforts in the program.

Some teachers were pleased with the popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird, which topped the list for ninth-through-12th graders. Others say the book owes much of its success to the fact that teachers make it a requirement. (The report doesn’t distinguish between books that were assigned and those students chose.

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