How to make an amazing kids travel journal….

After our amazing holiday to Cyprus earlier this year, we’ve decided to make our little mother and daughter holiday into an annual event which means we have lots more trips together to look forward to.  We’ve also decided that we want to travel more as a family so after a good few years of holidaying in the UK, we’re going to start to explore the world a little more.

To record all of our travels, and to surprise Miss Frugal with the location of next year’s mother and daughter trip, I decided to make her a bit of a travel journal.  It’s looking a bit empty at the moment but I hope that over the next few years we’ll be able to fill it with lots of adventures and memories.

I used to have a travel journal myself although I have no idea where it is now and it was filled with all sorts of memories from holidays we had – it even had rose petals from the rose Mr Frugal bought me on our first holiday together.

(Travel journal tip number 1 – plants and flowers do not make good additions as they go yucky brown quite quickly.)

I used to love looking through my travel journal as it brought back memories that I’d forgotten about and never failed to make me smile.  Giving Miss Frugal the chance to record her travels as I used to is a great gift and hopefully one she’ll treasure in years to come and share with her children.

Here’s a few tips on how to make and write a travel journal with your children….

Buy a pretty book to use as your travel journal

Totally superficial but I’ve always chosen pretty notebooks for my travel journals.  They need to be quite sturdy too with pages that can take the weight of whatever you’re going to stick in them, whether it’s photos, beer mats or tickets (which is what I used to put in mine).  For Miss Frugal’s travel journal I bought a photo album with thick card pages from Paperchase.  A pretty pen helps too. 😉

Decide what you want to include

I’ve kept ours quite basic at the moment as I’m conscious that the travel journal is Miss Frugal’s and I don’t want to put my stamp on it.  I’ve added a printout of the hotel, a few photos and a couple of my memories and left plenty of space for her to add her own.

As she starts to fill the book with our travels I’ll encourage her to include things like the things we did, maybe our route on a map, details about people we meet (even contact details if we swap details), a list of favourite moments and highlights like best view, best meal, funniest moment etc.

Remember it’s not homework

Unless she wants it to be, her travel journal doesn’t have to be in any set format and it doesn’t have to take any real effort.  We’re not writing a story or an essay, just recording individual moments and memories that she doesn’t want to forget.

There are no rules

She doesn’t have to write everything we did or take care writing things in order – it really is just a case of putting down on paper the bits she wants to remember.

Record funny conversations and moments

I’ll encourage her to just write it down as and when and not to worry about how it looks or how it fits in with the rest of the journal.  I had a page in mine for daft memories and they were all just randomly written down in little clouds.

Embrace the randomness

The pages I’ve made for Miss Frugal have a good sprinkling of random gold sparkly washi tape for no reason other than the fact it’s something I know she loves and she asked if I could use it to wrap her present up so I thought I’d go one step further.

Photos, photos, photos

When I kept travel journals there wasn’t the option of snapping hundreds of photos on a trip – a camera film had 24 or 36 exposures and you didn’t know if you’d taken a good picture until you got home and developed it.  These days you can take photos on your phone and print them out at a supermarket if you want to.  I’ll encourage her to take as many photos as she wants of everything and to be fair, what she doesn’t take a photo of, I probably will.  We can then add as many (or as few) photos as she wants to illustrate everything she wants to remember.

Scrap book everything.

I’ll encourage her to stick in tickets, bottle labels, beer mats, leaflets from places you go to, local newspapers clippings, receipts,  and anything else we pick up along the way by saving it all for her so she can choose what she wants to add in when we get home.  It’s a case of the more the merrier for me but I’m not sure how she’ll feel.

I’m going to give Miss Frugal this post to read so she gets a good idea of the things that she can include in her travel journal but ultimately it’s hers so I hope it will evolve into a great record of the trips we’re going to take.

Younger children might benefit from a few prompts to help them get started with their travel journals so I’ve made a little printable that you could print off each time you go somewhere new.  You could stick them all in a scrapbook as a younger years travel journal.

Have you ever kept a journal of any kind?

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