“Not” Back to School Blog Hop: Student Photo Week 2012

If you have been following my posts this month you may have noticed a marked increase in home school goodies. Truth be known I have not really written anything substantial about our home schooling journey until now. Thanks to a fun blog hop that I wanted to participate in, I am now sharing a bit more about our home education adventures. If you are interested in participating follow the link to the left for more details.

His says Pumpkin 1st grade 6 year, but it is hard to make out in the photo, can you tell the sun was in his sweet eyes?

This weeks blog hop topic is “Student Photo Week”. I generally take a fall photo of the kids that I print, label, and then stuff into envelopes and and mail off along with a Christmas card. This week’s topic really got me    to think about documenting the childrens’ growth from year to year in more than the traditional stiff posed portrait. 

Throughout the year I take lots of fun pictures, they generally end up being downloaded onto my home computer, organized to be found again, and then for the most part left with no attention and very little viewing. One thing that I did start our very first year of schooling was a journal that I expected eventually all of our children would contribute to, a sort of encyclopedia of learning. In our living encyclopedia we have pictures of nature, we have stories that we have learned, there are adventures we have had, and simple memories included to help the children recall things we worked hard to learn. Of course the idea of including our children’s growth for them to look through was fun enough, but then it hit me, why not add those pictures to our encyclopedia to look back at for years to come.

Why put in the stiff portraits that we pass out to our family when we can include pictures that truly capture the “wild” animals in their natural habitat? So that settled it, we will be adding a new section to our books for those crazy back to school pictures that may not quite be fit for our friends and family, but will certainly be well worth preserving for our own entertainment and memories for years to come.