Sparkle Crafts

Explore this Week: Coming Home Again – Tips for Preserving Memories

Over the past three weeks, we've explored different areas of our worlds, starting with our own backyards, expanding to neighborhood and local parks and going out even further to state and national parks. This week, we are bringing it home again and giving you tips for preserving memories both while you are out exploring, and when you come back home.

No vacation or adventure would be complete without a few souvenirs. Keep in mind, souvenirs don't always have to be in the form of miniature monuments, coffee mugs, or magnets. They can be also be drawings, poems, bits of nature, or postcards. Collecting these types of creative souvenirs can be an adventure in itself.

Here are a few tips for preserving your time spent exploring:

• Bring a camera: this one is probably obvious to most people. But to make it more fun for small children, allow them to bring a mini-Polaroid type of camera to get instant pictures they can put in their journals while still out on vacation.

• Nature journals: keeping a nature journal is a great way to remember the weather, plants, animals, and landscape of the place your are exploring. Include written notes, sketches, pressed leaves and flowers, and more, so you can bring home a little bit of the environment with you.

• Make a postcard book: this is easy and cheap to do. All you need is a key ring, single hole punch, and postcards. On your trip, purchase a postcard from every location you visit. Write something on the back to help you remember the place or the day, and then punch a hole in one corner and place it on the key ring.

• Make a shadowbox: this is an activity for when you have returned home. While you are out exploring, bring your explorer bag. Collect all sorts of neat things like rocks, leaves, dead bugs, shells, pine cones, and more. Then at home, using a purchased or self-made box, artfully arrange all the objects inside the box, and hang it on the wall.

• Lastly, create a scrapbook of all the things you've collected. This could be tickets, brocures, leaves, notes, pictures, receipts, and so on.

Preserving memories is a way to create something enduring and valuable for all members of the family, both young and old. Memories preserved in some manner, either on paper or in custom displays, makes it possible for children to better know their parents and grandparents – and for adults to better remember all the lovely things that happened in their lives and in the lives of their children.

Happy Exploring, everyone! (And happy returning home!)