Help your little ones cherish their youth with our childhood keepsake ideas. You'll find scrapbooks, memory boxes, and growth charts that you and your kids can work on together.
Set aside a small scrapbook or photo album, and each year add a photo of your child posing on her birthday. You can use either black-and-white or color photography, though color may be best if your child wants to show off her birthday finery. Remember to have your child stand so you can see how tall she's gotten from year to year.
A scrapbook can help organize -- and proudly display -- the steady stream of photographs, artwork, awards, and other keepsakes that accrue during a young person's school years.
The pages are made from notebook paper (ruled and graph styles) secured to hole-punched card stock using double-sided tape. Embellishments, including a school flag made from card stock and a composition book (made from a reduced color photocopy of a real one), add texture.
Instead of an album devoted to school, you can add a pocket to your scrapbook for your kids' school-related memorabilia, from school pictures to poems she wrote for homework.
Tape together 2 pieces of notebook paper (ours is 7 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches), short end to short end. Trim width if necessary to fit scrapbook pages. Fold paper up from bottom as shown, making pockets in desired depths. Stitch sides to scrapbook pages with a sewing machine to secure, or glue with an archival glue stick.
Organize your child's school pictures with an accordion-fold card made from card stock, craft punches, and alphabet stickers. Be sure to add to the collection each year.
For kids, summer seems to fly by so fast that it becomes a blur. A nice way for you and your children to capture those special summer memories is by making a scrapbook filled with souvenirs, photos, and stickers.
Keep vacation memories a little stronger a little longer with vacation memory jars. Filled with souvenirs collected on trips and pictures developed afterward, they are like little worlds that can be visited again and again. Kids can also add to them or rearrange them anytime they like. Bent wire can be used to lower and position objects in a thin-necked jar.
Put all of the souvenirs from your family road trip to use with a scrapbook on loose-leaf rings that your kid can cherish through the years.
Bring some supplies, such as a hole punch, plain tags with pre-punched holes, and maps. Have your child mark each city with a sticker on a map, and add a matching sticker to the envelope.
Kids can create small albums for their scrapbook, each with a story to tell -- the ones here are devoted to family and summer friends.
Stiff paper covers along with paper spines and corners give them a fancy hardcover feel. The book on top has a closure made with a paper fastener and string.
A page full of envelopes in many sizes and colors is ideal for kids to store hard-to-glue items or keepsakes they'll want to pull out and admire, like these birthday party mementos.
So the envelopes don't get sticky, remove the adhesive with a wet paper towel, and let dry. Then glue on with flaps open, overlapping slightly.
Have kids fill a box with birthday mementos to savor their birthdays through the years.
Children are natural collectors. Here's a great way to display the treasures they've brought home from family vacations, school, and the playground.
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