Hello! Amy here, ready to celebrate June with you: the month of relaxing into summer, eating popsicles and hanging out with friends and reading in the shade of a tree. Picnics in the park, swimming at the local pool, maybe even a family vacation. If your kids are anything like mine, summer is in full swing and school is starting to become a slightly-hazy memory of books and tests and teachers. So scrapping about school might seem like a strange thing to do right now. Trust me, though, now is the perfect time! Their memories are still fresh enough that you can capture all the details of their previous school year before they start forgetting them. (Because math facts and the periodic table aren’t the only things they forget over the summer.)
Of course, you’d probably like to be out there enjoying the summer days with your kids. So here’s my fast solution to getting down those school details before they join the ranks of such knowledge as the date of the French Revolution and who the 28th American president was: A school summary layout.
Here’s what I mean:
A school summary layout does exactly that: sums up the most important bits of an entire school year, all in one spot. To create one, just do the following:
- Find a photo or two that was taken near the end of the school year.
- Gather some questions that touch on the major points of the entire year. I’m including the questions I used as PDFs at the end of this post.
- Format the questions so they fit with the design elements of your layout. You could print them on tags, in narrow columns, or in circles. In the layout above, I made little pennants:
- Hand the printed summary to your kid the next time he or she complains about being bored. At my house this happened on the very first day of summer break! Ask your child to answer the questions using their own words and handwriting. (It will also reacquaint kids with the concepts of “pen” and “writing” which are, of course, easily forgotten in the summer.) Their penmanship is also a record of this time in their lives, so it fits right in with the layout’s purpose.
- Pair up the journaling with the photo, some embellishments and a title, and voila! One (or more, depending upon the kids in your family) school summary finished!
You can also just print the summary in one tall rectangle, like this:
Of course, you could come up with your own questions, but here are the PDFs with the questions I used to get you started. I wrote two different sets of questions, one for my kids in elementary and one for my kids in junior high & high school.
download School summary questions elementary
download School summary questions jr high and high school
Happy scrapping!
