Friday 10 October 2014

Creating a holiday scrapbook with young children

I love to travel, and I've always made scrapbooks to document my adventures. I first started making holiday scrapbooks on my childhood holidays to France, where I would fill old exercise books with pictures, postcards and notes. As an adult, I would keep a detailed diary while we were away, then on my return write it all up, glueing in pictures cut from tourist leaflets and ticket stubs.

On our recent holidays with small children it has been forgotten. I have usually been so busy looking after and entertaining the little ones that I don't think about making time to sit down and write up a diary (although this blog has proven to be a fantastic way of keeping a record about some of the places that we have visited as a family.)

On our recent holiday to Snowdonia, I decided that it would be the perfect opportunity for Harry to start his own holiday scrapbook. We bought him a cheap exercise book which had a plastic wallet attached to the cover, and I provided him with a pencil, crayons, glue and scissors. Then when we were out and about we collected tourist leaflets about the places that we had visited, postcards, and other paper ephemera souvenirs like tickets. I've never been organised enough to add actual photographs to my scrapbooks, but you could easily do this too with a bit of planning. Then every day at some point we sat down together and spent a few minutes writing about that day.

Child working on a holiday scrapbook

I cut out pictures for him from the leaflets, and he arranged them on to the page and glued them down. Then we added a date, a note about the location, and he drew some pictures himself. He wasn't keen on doing too much writing, but I gave him a few prompts and he wrote captions and labels for his pictures.

Page from a child's holiday scrapbook

You could ask your child some questions and write down their answers, or just chat to them about what you've done that day and write down what they say. Older children can be given a sentence to finish or a topic to write about. We also labelled maps with places that we visited and labelled diagrams of things that we've seen, for example the parts of a castle. 

Pages from a child's holiday scrapbook

Slightly older children can keep a more detailed diary, and research more about places that you've visited to add in some extra information.

It would also be a nice idea for children to start an online travel blog that could be shared with friends and family, and then it would be easy to include your digital photographs. This would be easy to update as you were away, as it only takes a few minutes to upload a photo and a few lines of text.

While you are out and about keep an eye out for ephemera that you can use in the scrapbook - we've used restaurant and attraction business cards, receipts, tickets, leaflets and so on. You can also buy postcards, stickers or bookmarks. Craft shops that sell scrapbooking supplies have ranges of themed stickers, for example stickers related to a country that you are visiting.

It's a good idea to photograph or scan the pages when you have finished so that you have a permanent record in case something happens to the original book. Something that I really need to get started on with my collection of holiday scrapbooks!

More recently we created a scrapbook together of our Summer Holiday 2016 - you can find out how we did it here - Making a Holiday Scrapbook

If you have younger children, you might like this post from my other blog Toddler Things - Preserving holiday memories with toddlers.

11 comments:

  1. What a lovely keepsake. I must do this with DD. We're off to Snowdonia again at half term - did you do the archery at Greenwood?

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    1. The archery in the picture he drew was at Caernarfon Castle but he did do it at Greenwood too, I didn't see as I was with my daughter in the soft play but he seemed to really enjoy it, he did really well too!

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  2. I did a scrapbook for the summer and I really enjoyed putting all of the photos and bits and pieces together as it really makes a lovely memento of the summer. This is a really lovely idea to do with children though and something really special to keep

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    1. I think I might start doing one for the summer too, we do so many day trips and outings that it would be nice to keep a record from the children's perspective.

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  3. Roo's old school used to ask them to complete a scrapbook over the holidays to bring into school - such a fun way of remembering what you have been up to

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    1. That is a a great idea, and nice to share with the rest of the class too.

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  4. Something I really should have done and never did! My son wrote a diary once on a cruise when he was 10 but then wasn't keen after that. Thank heavens for the blog for these latter years.

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    1. I'm so grateful for my blog too, I've written about places that we've visited in a lot of detail and it's lovely to look back and have all the pictures there too. I'm going to encourage my children to start blogs when they are a bit older!

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  5. Oh we do this. It's a great idea for a plane ride too (if they are a bit older) and they plan it all, and decorate the cover etc on the plane.

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    1. Making the book on the plane is a great idea, I might have to do this as we are heading off on holiday next week and that is a great activity!

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  6. Such a nice thing to do, we have lots of lovely scrapbooks from when the kids were younger of places we have been to, it is great to look back on them. Mich x

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