Color Outside the Lines: Photo Book Ideas for Creative Kids (and Parents!)
Photo by Polesie Toys
Summer break is a magical time for kids. It’s a welcome departure from the school-year routine, with ample time (and ideal weather) for unstructured play both inside and out of the house. Even if your summer plans are packed with camps, day trips, vacations, and organized group activities, there’s still tons of downtime in between. And, parents know that downtime often leads to cries of “I’m bored!” and “There’s nothing to do!”
One solution is to just… let your kids be bored (it’s totally OK). Another is to guide them toward a creative outlet, ideally something fun and low-pressure. Making a personalized photo book full of treasured memories is an excellent choice for a casual kids’ summer project. Introduce them to the super-easy drag-and-drop interface of Mixbook Studio™ and browse kid-friendly themes full of cheery colors, bold typography, and playful stickers.
There are endless variations on the photo book idea, so let the little ones brainstorm. We also have some great suggestions below.
Photo by Mike Fallarme
Kids’ DIY Art Portfolio
It’s a wonderful thing for children to be artistic and express themselves through various messy media. It’s a little less wonderful for parents figuring out which works of art to keep, display, store away, or secretly dispose of. An art portfolio photo book is a fantastic solution, and one that your budding artist can do independently, with a little supervision.
Together, gather all the art projects in the house and decide which ones are portfolio-worthy. Perhaps it’s all of them. Photograph the artwork—your kid might be able to handle this with a tablet, camera, or borrowed smartphone—and upload all the images to Mixbook. All of our photo book themes are 100% customizable, but we do have several options designed especially for this kind of project:
Show your creative kid how to drag and drop photos of their art into the frames and customize other elements like text, backgrounds, and stickers.
For more, read our comprehensive guide: How to Turn Kids’ Art Into a Photo Book
Nature Journal Photo Book
Summer break means spending tons of time outdoors, which makes it a truly wonderful time for nature-loving children. Whether your outdoor adventures are mostly playing in your local area, going for hikes, hitting the beach, or digging in the garden, they make a really fun theme for a kids’ photo book project.
Take photos, and encourage the kids to snap their own as well, featuring the natural side of summer fun. Document discoveries of interesting insects, plant specimens, tide-pool creatures, and little critters like lizards and birds. Your child might like to look up the names of species or interesting facts about the natural world. Encourage them to turn these bits of info into captions for their photo book.
Another idea is for kids to draw sketches of the natural world, or preserve specimens like leaves and flowers. You can scan this kind of memorabilia to include in their photo book. These photo book themes are great choices for a nature journal:
Photo by RDNE Stock Project
Sibling or Family Storybook
A photo book is a great way to capture memories of your kids’ special sibling relationships. You might also expand the photo book idea to cover the whole family. Consider one of these child-friendly photo book themes for the project:
- Rainbow is My Favorite Color by Ampersand Design Studio
- Love These Colorful Days by Laura Blythman
- Family Tree Board Book
Take inspiration from your existing photo collection for the content of a sibling or family storybook. Look through photos with your children and ask them which are their favorites, and what memories they have about those pics. If they’re too young to remember, you can tell them stories like “this was the day you first met your baby brother,” or “you were so sweet to hold her hand on the first day of preschool.” Together with the kids, turn these photos into meaningful photo book pages with accents like text and stickers.
For a whole family photo book, dedicate a page or two-page spread to each sibling, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent etc. Choose photos with special memories attached to them, like dancing at a wedding, taking a day trip together, or celebrating a birthday.
A Personalized ABCs Book
ABCs books are a timeless and straightforward concept with unlimited possibilities. Let your kids come up with their own ideas for what each letter of the alphabet should stand for. It could be personalized to your own family and friends e.g. “B is for Billy, our next door neighbor’s beagle,” or your kids’ favorite things, like “H is for hot sauce, which Dad loves to put on everything.” Children might customize an ABC book around their interests, like animals, dinosaurs, or space.
Parents will probably need to help with ideas for some letters, but otherwise let the kids get creative. This project is also likely to require some original photography, which can keep the kids busy. Do you even have a photo of Billy the beagle or Dad’s hot sauce bottle? Get snapping, kids!
You can turn any photo book theme into an ABC book using Mixbook Studio™’s text tools. Or, use one of these ready-to-go ABC book themes:
Photo by Polesie Toys
Toys and Stuffed Animals Storybook
Summer downtime is prime time for playing with toys and stuffed animals. Add a new, creative dimension for this kind of play by suggesting your kids write and photograph stories about their toys and stuffed animals. They can use a tablet to take photos while playing, and tell you all about these imaginary adventures. Maybe a model dinosaur takes a train ride to the Arctic and meets a stuffed penguin. Or the teddy bears have a tea party with Barbie and Mr Potato Head.
Help your child upload photos of their toys’ adventures and write captions or a full-length story to explain what’s going on. Let their imaginations run wild, and capture it all in a printed photo book they’ll treasure forever.
The following themes are our top choices for this kind of storybook:
Photo by Kampus Production
Memories of Summer Sports and Camps
During summer break, many kids enjoy extra time for their favorite sports or get to try out new activities at camps. For active, sporty kids, this is a major highlight of summer. Capture the memories of all the fun, learning, and teamwork on the field, court, field, track, or pool, and turn them into a sports-themed photo book.
Your kid might like to recall key moments, exciting plays, winning scores, and all kinds of other details from their experiences. These can inspire the pages and spreads of their photo book, and be used for captions that help preserve those awesome summer sports memories.
Mixbook has a whole collection of sports photo book themes, including these top choices:
- Kids Sports Book by Ampersand Design Studio
- Dance Club
- Soccer
- Basketball Sports Collection
- Vintage Baseball
Scavenger Hunt Photo Adventure
A scavenger hunt is a great way to keep kids busy, on the move, and using their brains during summer break. Turn a scavenger hunt into a photo adventure by instructing the kids to photograph each item they find from the list and make notes about where they found it, how easy it was to find, and any fun stories about the search.
This could be an epic, summer-long quest, or just a fun diversion during a trip to the park. You might include things they’ll find indoors and outside, or at specific locations like the library, Grandma’s house, the beach, or their own bedroom. Make sure the scavenger hunt is age-appropriate, with mostly achievable items and a few harder-to-find things. Create a paper checklist, which you can scan or reproduce as the introductory page in the photo book.
We think these fun themes would be great for a scavenger hunt photo adventure book:
This summer, introduce your kids to creative photo projects
Children can be incredibly creative, and it’s a wonderful thing to channel that creativity into a tangible project. Creating a custom photo book is well within the skillsets of most kids. They just need a little supervision, some tips for using the tools in Mixbook Studio™, and a project idea to inspire them. Resist the urge to interfere or aim for perfection, and let your kid take pride in their amazing photo book.
Looking for even more summer activity ideas? Check out these Top 10 Summer Crafts for Kids.
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