Book of Friends & Post Card Swap

One of the projects we did before all of our friends scattered to the international winds was to make our Book of Friends.

To make them I took pictures of each of the girls, swore when they didn’t immediately magically appear on my computer, cropped them to mostly face (after printing out Penelope’s too small), and printed them out 4 to a page. Then the girls cut themselves out, and glued them onto the About Me page template, and filled it out with a combination of true and silly facts about themselves.

When they were done I scanned in all the full sized pages and printed them out 4 to a page, cut them all out, had help collating them into stacks for each girl, and stapled them along the edges. Books!

I loved reading the girl’s unexpected favorites, and seeing how some of them chose to decorate their pictures! Which is why we did the two part process of printing out their pictures, rather than just adding their digital pictures to the scanned text.

And Penelope really enjoyed taking her ‘Book of Friends’ on vacation with her, and having grandma read it.

If you would like the files we used to create these, here is an editable Open Office document and a PDF.

The other project we did before leaving for vacation was a post card swap. I bought a bunch of post card stamps, and cut up blank paper for post cards. I had to go through a bunch of paper to find some that was the appropriate thickness, I’d been planning to use card stock but it wasn’t quite thick enough, I ended up using some random art paper and watercolor paper from my stash. (Here are the Post Office guidelines for postcards.)

I think we had about 8 kids that wanted to do it, so all the moms wrote their kids address on 8 post cards, stamped them, and then passed them out.

The idea is that each child has a bunch of blank postcards pre-addressed and stamped for their friends, that they can write and draw pictures on as a fun vacation literacy project.