Scrapbooking with Young Children

Most kids love craft work.  They love to stick and color, and to cut and design.  They love to match colors and papers, to explore texture and shapes.  What better opportunity for them to do this then scrapbooking where they can see something grow from their creative endeavor?  Scrapbooking is a great hobby and one which keeps many adults busy in their free time, but it's also something that you can encourage your little ones to become involved with and to start their own scrapbooking craze!

As soon as you invite them to sit with you, their little hands are going to be in amongst your precious papers and peel-offs!  They'll want to use your best metallic gel pens and have your glitter glue covering any die-cut they can get their hands on.  So before you invite them to your crafting table, prepare yourself!

They need their own supplies!  If they have their own, they won't damage yours.  There are two ways of doing this, you can either give them a basic supply of papers, some stickers, photos and pens - complete with a box to keep it all in of course, or you can give them a budget to buy their own things and take them to the store to choose what they would like to use.  You could even do a mixture of both of these, get them started with a basic kit, and then take them with you on your next scrapbooking store visit and allow them to purchase so many items for their own scrapbooking stash.

Once your children have supplies, show them your pages.  Show not only the finished page, but also the supplies you used to create the layout so that they can see how your page was built up using a number of different techniques and supplies.  Then have them choose something they want to scrapbook about - get them to narrow it down to something specific - perhaps a trip to a theme park, or a birthday party.   Then collect some appropriate photos that they can choose from.  Tell them to design a layout on a piece of scrap paper - this can be as simple as a box representing each photo in the place they will put it on the cardstock - then get them to choose the papers and embellishments they want to use to dress up their page.

Once they know how they want their page to look, show them different techniques of sticking the various component parts to their cardstock, and the different things they can use to cut their photos into the shapes they want - such as fancy scissors, small photo trimmer or shaped stencil.  If you have really young children, you might need to prepare the photos.

Then leave them to it!  A child's imagination will often take it off into a different dimension when allowed to run free with a pile of crafting supplies, so don't be at all surprised if the layout looks nothing like you thought it would - it's probably exactly the way your child thought it would!  Once your child knows how to do the various basic scrapbooking procedures, it will be a hobby that you can share together for many years to come.

Information is for educational and informational purposes only and is not be interpreted as financial or legal advice. This does not represent a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Please consult your financial advisor.