A child’s collection can be valuable without having a value an adult would recognize.

Value in a child’s collection lives in the sorting rather than the objects. The bottle caps and folded tickets are a system, a memory, and one of the first things in life that is genuinely theirs to arrange. Adults measure by price, which returns nothing here, and then conclude there is nothing to measure. What is being built is the habit of caring about something carefully.

Ask how the collection is organized before you ask anything else about it. Let them explain the categories, even the ones that make no sense to you. When space runs short, sort it together rather than clearing it while they are out.