During the Autumn School Term at Honey’s school I held a few 6 week scrapbooking classes/courses for the Juniors (and the seniors, but that’s in another post)…  We made Envelope Scrapbook Albums and here are the pictures.  The children were aged between 4 and 7 and I think they did rather well.  For most of them, this was their first ever scrapbook!

The blanks for these were very easy to make and I used C5 (take A5 size paper) envelopes from Tesco! 

I just sealed them up, sliced a thin slither off one end of each envelope and then put 3 of them together, punched holes, bit of string and there you have a nice blank canvas which includes 3 pockets for the children to enjoy decorating. 

The theme for these was “This is Me” and each double page spread was about them in some way, their bedroom, their family, what they like, etc.  The idea was that they would add photographs (or drawings) when they got home and so they were given white rectangles to take the place of the photographs in the meantime.  I did take a photograph of the group and gave them little printouts of it at the following session so that they had at least 1 “real” photograph in their mini scrapbook albums.

It was great to see how different all the little creative minds were and how they worked… whether they neatly laid out their papers and embellishments, or whether they just slapped stuff on willy-nilly! 

I learnt a lot, very quickly!  The first thing was not to give them much choice in materials, as they can’t cope with that… and the second thing was to keep it very simple and show them something quickly and then just let them do their own thing really.

Especially in scrapbooking… there are no rules only techniques to learn!

I have taken children’s workshops before, but not as young as these children (I had taught 7-11 year olds).  Also in my previous workshops the children were given small kits and the whole thing was made in a single two hour session.  These sessions were weekly half hour sessions!

Still both groups of younger children really enjoyed themselves!