A Christmas Birthday

Lori's birthday is on the 27th December, and it sometimes feels like it's hard to make a clear distinction between Christmas presents and her birthday.

We've tried to make it special, with the aid of Grandma Cook, by making a yearly trip to a Christmas show, or pantomime, for a birthday treat. This year it was Beauty and the Beast at the Lyceum in Edinburgh.

The obvious thing to do with the scrapbook was to use the tickets, but the programme was full of line art and rich colours, and the children were eager to use some of the "pretty pictures" in their scrapbooks.

There were some lovely details in the programme. These details can be useful to cut out and use them to frame the pages of the book:

There were concept sketches from the costume designers, so we mixed these up with the photos of the cast in their costume. 

Unlike some of Josie's pages, Lori can't do as much writing (yet). However, she still likes to add occasional details of her own, and I like to encourage her. A scrapbook can be a really good way to encourage a developing reader or writer to develop their skills.

I'm looking forward to seeing what this year's Christmas Birthday Concert Show Pantomime brings!

Here's a full shot of how one of the pages turned out:

Using creativity as a coping mechanism

I try not to impose my own ideas on what the Scrapbooks should become, because ultimately I'd like them to be a memento that Josie and Lori created themselves, and have meaning for them. Often, they do something completely different from what I would ever have suggested, and it reflects their different personalities, current obsessions, and anxieties.

For example, whenever they go to the dentist, they get a couple of stickers. I thought that they might use them to decorate other pages, or perhaps make a dentist visit page. Josie proposed something different, which reflects her personal feelings about the dentist: a Bravery page. She's always felt a lot of anxiety about the dentist, although she's never had any particularly bad experiences, except in the worrying recesses of her anxious mind. So, it was good to see her coming up with an idea that I hoped she could use as a coping mechanism.

Here's the result:

This page makes me proud, because every time she goes to the dentist she struggles with palpable anxiety and panic, and with an effort of will, and some support from me, she forces it under control.

As her page says: Dentist Stickers. Brave! And she is.

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.

Picking a scrapbook

Last summer Josie's holiday task was to keep a diary or a scrapbook. We chose scrapbook, and we've been working on it all year.

The first task is to choose a suitable scrapbook. Josie has quite big writing, so I knew I needed quite a large scrapbook. The second consideration was durability. We planned to take the scrapbook with us on holiday, where it would be in and out of bags, and generally thrown around. I also wanted it to last after it was completed, so Josie would have a keepsake in future. Those were my two main criteria, but Josie had one too. It had to be colourful.

We went up to Paperchase to browse their scrapbook selection. They're not the cheapest stationery shop, but they are one of the best for scrapbooks.

Josie was immediately taken with the Spectrascope range, and I was also pretty pleased. The range came in a variety of different size. It met her criteria: colourful pages. It met my criteria of durability: the pages are thick card stock, but they are bound with two thick sheets of protective plastic.

The perspex sheet protects the vulnerable card underneath.

We picked the large scrapbook, 30 pages of multi-coloured card. At £8.50 it was quite expensive, but I thought it was a worthwhile expense.My only issue with it was that the perspex plastic was cloudy, rather than see-through.

As soon as we got home, Josie immediately created a front cover to declare her scrapbook open! I bought a stencil art set as part of the train activity set I was building, in preparation for the long journey to Malvern for summer holidays. We opened them a bit early, and she used these to add to her own text on the front cover. The stencils were a pack from Klutz, which has loads of really good craft kids for children.

Those stencils were a good buy; Santa even used them to decorate the house with snow spray animals for Christmas morning. The only drawback with colourful card is that the art laid directly on the page isn't that vibrant. However, self-made art isn't really the point of a scrapbook.

In the next post, I'll discuss the various different items you can collect and use, and ideas that we came up with for our scrapbook pages. For now, here's the front cover: