Hi all - I am thinking about making my son a book of his awards that he can keep and look through. He has a lot of "awards" that are for little things and I thought it would be cute to put them in a binder of some kind. These are like the "student of the week" or "certificate of kindness" awards. I keep the more important awards myself for framing or keepsakes.
I tried searching for something online, but I must not be using the right keywords because I am not finding what I think would work. Ideas? Or I can go to a specific store when I go to the cities this weekend if you know of something that might have these. Typically the awards are standard paper size, but it would be nice to have a spot for some more unusual sized stuff, too.
Thanks in advance!
What about a School Days organizer? I use those for my kids. They have spots for the class photo's and envelopes for report cards and awards from pre-school through high school.
you can buy those clear plastic sleeves that are meant to go into a 3 ring binder.
it's called a memory book. Others call it scrapbooking. There was a company that was HUGE in the 2000's called Creative Memories that had a bunch of stuff to help make memory books, etc.
Find a big 3 ring photo album. Put the awards on the pages in a age progression sequence. You can write a note to go with the award. Your feelings, etc. Include pictures if you have them.
What my mom did was put pictures, captions, memories she had with the boys. Now that she's dead? I'm carrying it on. She gave one to each of her grandchildren when they graduated high school along with a quilt she made just for them. She made the quilts for my boys - unbeknowest to my dad - so when we were going through things and we found my boys quilts? We both cried. I have them here with me in a air tight storage bag.
3 ring binder and page protectors. If you have a lot of odd sized ones you can go to somewhere like Michael's and get a bigger binder for scrap booking and the bigger sized page protectors.
Any art/craft store in America has a scrap booking section with tons of supplies for this kind of thing. Michaels, Joann's, Hobby Lobby, shoot, even Walmart and Target.
How about photocopying or scanning them, and creating a digital scrapbook? They're easy to do. Costco, shutterfly, etc, all have photo storage options. You could include school photos of him, little embellishments, and you wouldn't have to worry about keeping this large binder of paper around. That also allows you to shrink some of the larger things, and group some of the less significant awards on a single page.
Scrapbook binder may be the perfect solution to your this issue. Some of them are quite large and make great places for these items to be housed and viewed.
Sounds like a really nice idea!
We did a scrapbook for a grandmother's 90th, and each family member did a double page spread, and then we added stuff as a group. We got a standard scrapbook with plastic sleeves instead of paper pages. We used scrapbook background paper and mounted things on those, then slipped them into the sleeves. If you put 2 documents/certificates back to back, you can slide them into one sleeve. Scrapbook paper isn't 8.5 x 11 like the certificates, so you can slip some of those pages in behind your certificates. They would work well with smaller pieces too. Get some double-stick tape from the craft store to anchor small pieces without ruining anything, and be sure you get the removable tape so you can reposition things if you make a mistake or just change your mind. For example, if you have a photo of him at the age when he received the award or on the ball field or whatever, add those to the appropriate page or the facing page. You can also buy those "embellishments" - little stickers or 3-D symbols to decorate the borders of small pieces. What we did was complete the pages and spread them all out on counters, beds, whatever until they were set. Then we batched them and inserted them at the last minute. We also wrote up and typed/printed comments, personal reflections, memories, and so forth to add to the pages as an intro and a conclusion. In my experience, the craft store employees are really experienced and have a good eye. We even told them we weren't too talented, and they were so helpful!
What's wrong with a 12"X12" scrapbook? You can buy them everywhere. At Hobby Lobby they have lots of paper and cardstock and lots of stuff you can use to make the pages look wonderful.
You can google scrapbooking and when you find sites go to "layouts". This will help you see things you can do with the things you want to save for him.
When my kids were in preschool they did tons of art and some of them were amazing. I didn't know what to do with them, so bought those page protectors (clear sleeves) as others have mentioned, and put two in a sleeve, and kept in a 3 ring binder. Sounds very basic but easy to view their art/awards/certificates and they like to flip through it. I like that you can keep adding to the binder without difficulty.
You could do a binder for elementary school - another for middle, etc. depending on how many certificates/awards he gets.
Any supply store or even Walmart or dollar store has those sleeve inserts.
