It just so happens that my cousin happens to be the emperor of digital scrapbooking–and the brains and beauty (sorry, Randy!) behind Designer Digitals. Spend a few moments on the Designer Digitals site and you'll be fighting the urge to start filling your cart with amazing bits of digital supplies from designers like Katie herself, Ali Edwards, Cathy Zielske and other talented designers.
As much as I love the idea of digital scrapbooking, (no mess! no storage!) I'm finding that my daughters aren't quite at the point where they can scrap independently, without my help.
Months and months ago, Katie gave my girls a few of her scrapbooking kits–which include an album, papers and all kinds of bits and bobs and supplies to make their own pages.
Armed with my favorite little compact photo printer
When we get out the scrapbooking supplies, I try to make myself pretty scarce. The more mothering years I have under my belt, the more I realize that it's often good to step back and out of the way of my girls' creative process. I'll come through every now and then just to be sure supplies are being properly shared and caps are being put back on glue sticks, but otherwise, I find that it is in that independence and freedom where the magic really happens.
And I know myself well enough to know that if I didn't leave the room, I'd be directing the placement of every button and paper color combinations.
For Emma, my oldest, I'm seeing lots of emotion (and passion:) come out on the page. I'm getting glimpses of what parts of her day spark her interest. She is also quickly becoming my journalling child. She keeps her commonplace, and this summer she's been keeping an almost daily record of her mornings at the barn. And she's slowly transfering some of that journaling into her scrapbook.
Mary, just a few years behind Emma is trying to keep up with her older sister–writing, journaling and scrapping things that are important to her.
And for Elizabeth, it's all about play and color and layering and deciding which colored brad goes with which puffy sticker.
Meanwhile, my homeschooling wheels are starting to smoke as I'm trying to figure out how I can incorporate this medium of creativity into our school days without making it feel forced. For now, at the very least, I think I'll encourage a weekly scrapbooking session as a journalling element to our curriculum. Maybe even let them earn the purchase of new supplies! But I'd love to see how I could make this stretch into some academic areas, as well.
I'm still working on that.
In the meantime, if you're a scrapbooking pro and you have any suggestions for STORAGE, I'd love to hear. My current system–throw it all back in the lid of the box it came in–isn't quite working out. There must be a better way.
And I'd love to hear if you're a scrapbooker, or if your kids have caught the bug just like mine. Do tell!
You need a tacklebox! It’s perfect for all the little stuff that’s hard to store. And for the paper I use a 12X12 file that I won from creative memories.
As a biologist and teacher, this is giving me all sorts of ideas of how you could incorporate this stuff into learning about nature, farm life, seasons, etc. Most scientists keep some sort of notebooks or journals, in the field or in the laboratory. Observations, classifications, life cycles, all kinds of things could be captured in a scrapbook. You could also incorporate magazine or other clippings, newspaper articles, collected items like leaves or flowers… Just a thought…
I think one way to incorporate scrapbooking is to have the girls do character studies. I used to like to have my students draw a portrait of the protagonist using clues from the text. They would have to delve into the text and ferret out words like ruddy or stooped, figure out what that meant and then incorporate it into their picture. I think you could do something like that and extend it to keeping a journal in a character’s voice or a scrapbook for a character’s life.
So far you already have some great ideas going.For storage..a 12×12 box but inside I keep envelopes or ziploc baggies…even smaller tupperware containers to store stickers and scraps.As for incorporating it into school, the girls could journal on themes (family, seasons, animals, love, etc.) and then put the scrapbook pages together..or for a poetry unit.Looks great and sounds like so much fun!
These scrapbooks look great. I bet they had loads of fun.
I also love to scrapbook my family history. I just bought some more scrapbooking supplies with the family history theme. Just hope I get time to scrapbook soon.
scrapbooking supplies