Preserve Home School Memories With Picaboo Yearbooks!

Even before I was a mother, I loved taking photos and using those pictures in photo albums and scrapbooks. The many missions trips I took are now preserved beautifully in handmade scrapbooks and I love looking back at those memories safely tucked away for easy viewing. Now that I am a mom, I have continued on with my scrap booking and each one of my children has a scrapbook from their first year. It takes some time to do these books but it is well worth the effort. Being that we now home school, we have yet another big part of our lives that can be preserved via pictures and scrapbooks and I have taken full advantage of that. I have just this week completed my daughter's Pre-K and it feels GOOD to be done! I also am very pleased that we have finished and she progressed so well. Homeschooling can make you feel like you are missing out on things that public educated children receive...like graduation ceremonies and yearbooks; until now.

I am a home school graduate and never had a yearbook. It is NOT silly to have a yearbook for your family's home school and I am here today to introduce you to Picaboo Yearbooks! This is a company that allows schools - public, Christian and home school to create their very own customized yearbooks...something that I had never dreamed of having for my own children.

For the purpose of this review, I was given the opportunity to create a 20 Page Softcover Yearbook and I took my ideas to the Picaboo Yearbooks website and began to let my creative juices flow. Before I started anything, I watched the tutorial that is offered on the site. I had tried to give it a go on my own first, but quickly realized that this would take a bit of learning first. 

The first thing you need to do is create a book and then label your sections. You can use whatever section names you wish such as Field trips, Writing Class, etc. These category titles won't be printed in your book but are just guidelines to keep you organized. I did have problems adding more pages to each section though and still don't know exactly how to do that. When you are setting up the sections, you choose ahead of time how many pages you want for each section. Well, when I started my project I had no idea how many pages I would want for each section so when I got into the book and started designing, I realized there were some sections that I wanted more pages for and some that I wanted less. Changing that seemed impossible and so I just added extra sections at the end.

Next, you upload the images you want to use and put them in the different sections. One thing that I struggled with was figuring out how to move images from one section to another. For instance, I had some pictures in the wrong section and wanted to move them but could not figure out how. I played with the application for awhile and finally figured it out. Watching the tutorial helped some but I still dealt with a bit of confusion. Once you have organized your pictures you can get to work designing your pages. As you can see in the photo above, I have all my pictures for those two pages on the bottom of the screen. You can pick out different layouts, backgrounds and fonts to use and this is where I had the most fun! :) There are many MANY backgrounds to choose from and so you can really customize your pages to fit the photos and your "tastes".

Here is an up-close photo of two pages from my Yearbook. One feature that I loved was when it came to moving around the pictures, you would get notified if your picture was out of the printable area. This really helps to prevent your pictures getting chopped off or cropped. As I would move a picture around, the areas that would not be printed would highlight yellow so I knew I had to rearrange my pictures/text differently. For schools, Picaboo Yearbooks allows you to have multiple people working on the yearbook at one time so you can really experience diversity and personality in each section.

Designing each page was SO MUCH FUN. :) It brought back so many memories of our first year of home school (which is a monumental accomplishment for me) and it feels good to now have these memories all in one place to look at in the years to come. I now want to show you some of my favorite pages of my year book. :)

This is the front and back of my Yearbook. I chose the background, font size and type and also the text. I love how it turned out!

On this page, I was able to document some of Hannah's days of writing. Teaching a child to learn how to write is such a wonderful feeling, I wanted to remember that. Her concentration and focus was adorable! I really liked this page's background because it looks like a child's writing.

This was also a fun page because it shows how we utilized the iPad for certain subjects...here she is writing letters on our handwriting app. 

This is quite possibly my favorite page of the entire book. Hannah was having one of "those" days and I happened to capture her mood in a photograph.(This also proves the importance of documenting the good along with the bad...it is all memorable!) We had MANY of those days and this just goes to show that being a homeschooler is not always easy but we do make it and survive the hardest of days! :)

These two pages were fun to create only because they show our first days of home school and the transition from homeschooling in the old house to doing school in our new house...an important time of our life that I want to look back on fondly. 

Last but not least, I wanted a really good final page for my thoughts about the school year. I found this amazing background that and I was able to type right in it, giving a black board look. Isn't it cute?!? I wanted a place for me to reflect on the year and give honor and glory to God...for it is HIS strength and grace that saw us through our very first year of home school! I am THRILLED with my Picaboo Yearbook. I would love to get one for each year of home school because I believe it is truly a wonderful way to record and preserve your school memories. Cherishing these years is so important because they fly by so quickly.

Pricing for a yearbook identical to the one I received is $8.49 with additional pages costing $.22 each. You can get a FREE eYearbook as well! Not bad! The only thing I don't like is that shipping is $10.99...EEK! I think that shipping could be a bit cheaper as this book is super light and really would not honestly cost much to ship. **UPDATE** Shipping is now $8.99, which sounds so much better! :)

You can check out other review for Picaboo Yearbooks by clicking the banner below. My fellow Crew mates have some wonderful reviews and if you are still on the fence about if you want one or not, check out these reviews...I am sure you will be VERY excited about creating your very own Yearbook after reading what they have to say! :)