I'm no pro with organizing, printing, or even taking photographs--as you can obviously see from this blog. Someone that is amazing at this is Heidi over at
Mount Hope Chronicles where I go for homeschool Eye Candy (yes, that is the name of my Favorites folder her blog is in).
But I've successfully printed two Homeschool Yearbooks out of our 3 years of school. (That middle year, when I had a baby, we're still filling in the pieces from--which is perfectly understandable, right?)
Homeschool Yearbooks are a different beast
--in that, organizing photos chronologically would be fragmented, and virtually everything else overlaps creating a potential BLAAAH everywhere.
But, unlike a brick and mortar school yearbook it's incredibly rewarding when done because instead of having to search through the entire thing for the 3 pictures of your children and things relative to them--they are on EVERY page.
I create a Yearbook because I want to:
1. Motivate myself to keep going.
It gives validity to what I do everyday. To look back and say "Yeah, we did learn something. Here's a picture of my daughter painting a letter "A", and in this other book she's reading! Oh, and here she's doing another painting--with the brush upside down."
Hmmm.
2. Make sure my children see that we had fun.
Who knows what memories will stick in their head, or come out later in therapy? At least I've got proof that it wasn't just an isolated cell they were educated in with rats rummaging through the endless piles of broken pencil leads, chipped abacus beads, and flash cards. We went on field trips, frequented the park, had friends over, and enjoyed being together.
3. Reward my effort with something pretty.
I can crop out the laundry pile in the other room, dirty diaper smell doesn't translate to photo paper, and if you were grumpy that day--you're not in that spread. See how nice that is? All I'm left with is a cute corner of life to look fondly back on as the rest fades-thankfully- into oblivion...
4. Remember what we did.
Because, if I don't put it on paper somewhere--I forget about it. I want to remember what we enjoyed, and the things we tried that worked well so we can be sure to repeat them. I'll know what field trips are worth the effort and what field trips ar---Never mind. If it's a field trip, I'll go.
5. Capture a child's predisposition.
Family Albums to me, are more general--and I just don't have the get-up-and-go to do an album for each child every year. But if I do a yearbook, I can capture who that child was at 6...8...10 y/o. It's been sometimes surprising when I've noticed patterns. Oh, you were into climbing up
everything that year, you were the one always
Right There when the camera came out, and you are happily somewhere in the background--to busy to be bothered.
Aha! You thought you'd see some of our faces here, huh!?
