Compulsively Collecting

Children get bored quickly. I don't tend to do more than one or two pages in a session, so it's important to have a bits box to keep all your collected memories in until they're ready to go in the scrapbook.

Scrapbooking isn't an expensive activity to do with the children. The main outlay is the scrapbook itself, which I talk about in a post here, but even that could be done with a very simple book from a local poundstore or supermarket. Aside from that, all you really need is: scissors and glue (I use a strong glue stick). The point of scrapbooking is that everything else is free.

So, what kind of things are everything else, when you're working with children to make a scrapbook?

Whenever we're out and about, I compulsively gather free stuff that we can use to chronicle the day's events in the book. I encourage Josie and Lori to think about it too, but they tend to forget.

I start with the bits and bobs we've picked up, and then I help Josie and Lori to build a page around them. Don't be afraid to encourage them to cut up the things you've collected.

Here are some ideas:

Tickets for anything (train, theatre, workshops, bus, museums), brochures, maps, post cards, photos, birthday cards, stickers, menus, letters, certificates (school, sports, brownies/cubs), paper bags with logos on them, business cards, mail order catalogues (these are useful for cutting out decorative bits and bobs), theatre programmes, children's art work.

If you can pick it up, then do, you can always recycle anything you don't use in a collage, or the recycling bin.

Here's an example of a day out page from our holiday in Great Malvern last year. Josie decided that she would like to do a history page, after we had been to Great Malvern Priory and Museum.

The whole page was constructed using a single leaflet about the Priory. It had lots of detailed information that we cut out and laid out across the page. We used a couple of photos from the brochure to show the Priory, and also cut out a plan of the Priory. Josie wrote the title in first. She wanted people to feel like they were going back into the past, so she used this for the title. Then we stuck in all the little bits of info that we'd cut out and laid out. Finally, Josie added some pictures to make it look like all the information was actually inside the Priory, and to give extra details that we didn't get in the brochure (like the stained glass window, herself walking through the Priory, and some information on what a Priory is) . I think it came out quite well:

There were some really interesting little details, and so we made sure we captured them:

C.S. Lewis taught in a school in Great Malvern, and it's believed that the old gaslights in the main street were the inspiration for the Narnia light. There's one left in the graveyard.

Maps and plans are always useful to illustrate the place that we were in, especially if it has a key, so you don't need to provide one yourself!

Josie doesn't really enjoy writing that much, and that's why we chose scrapbook not diary, so we try to minimise the amount that she has to do to brief commentaries and titles.

All in all, we were both very pleased with how this page turned out.