Creating a Class Photo Book

Wouldn’t this be the perfect year to create a class photo book? One teacher I know creates a computer generated small 8 X 8 book each year for each class she teaches; for herself, not her students. She is probably entering her ninth or tenth year teaching soon. What a wonderful way to document your career!

Different types of Class Photo Books

There are a variety of ways to make a class photo book. It can be as simple as printing a few pictures of each student throughout the year and taping them to sheets of paper that are made into a book. Or your class photo book can actually be made on the computer in a couple of ways.

My favorite type of photo books are digital computer-generated ones.

Computer Made Class Photo Books

If these books had been available during my teaching years, I might have done the same thing as the teacher I mentioned above. I taught for 17 years and then became a site administrator (a VP, then principal).

Now, I make a lot of online photo books for my family memories and for trips that I take. There are a number of companies that allow you to make photo books.

The one I use and know a lot about is Shutterfly. One of the nice things about Shutterfly is that they send (or have on the site) discounts or coupon codes quite frequently. And the 8 X 8 books are fairly inexpensive. Below is a photo book I made for my grandson to learn the alphabet. This is the 8 X 8 book that is sold by Shutterfly. Here is a link to Shutterfly in case you want to take a look at it.

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But an even more awesome benefit would be that you could offer this link to parents. Then they could get the class photo book for their child as well.

Now that many teachers have been deep diving into online work, creating one of these books might be fairly easy if you take a look and try. There are a number of companies that make these types of books. I’ve been using Shutterfly for about eight years now and I like it a lot. I am not an affiliate for them, just a fan.

Photo books made on the copy machine…

Probably a much more cost effective method would be to use the school color printer. Or even one at a copy center if you need to. But depending on the number of pages this could add up quickly. It can be pretty costly since color copies are more than black and white ones.

I suppose you can make the books in black and white and they would be appreciated also. To create these types of books you load the pictures onto your computer (or email them to yourself). Then you just copy and paste them onto a word document. You can move them around on the page and size them by using the formatting tabs in WORD. You can also add a frame around each photo to make it look nice. And put a border on the entire page, along with page numbers, titles and words.

What to document in the photo book? I would include a few every day photos from our regular class time. And then most pictures would be from special, fun school events; field trips, sports days, holidays like Halloween, and other such fun times. These are the times that students remember the most, after all.

Do you have class parties for holidays? I hope you’re allowed to have a few. They make such fun memories for students. I wrote another article about class parties. You can read it here.

Managing Classroom Parties at School

But even if you don’t have parties, I’m sure there are lots of other fun things each year that you can include.

Pandemic memories

Now that we are forced to use ZOOM or Google classroom to see our students, there aren’t many pictures from these recent months. My only suggestion for this would be to ask your students’ parents to send you a few pictures of their child. They can be working on something or having fun at home. Then you could do a few pages about “at-home learning” months.

Whatever you choose to do, I hope that you are able to memorialize the year for your students. It is definately one for the history books.

Until Next Time,

I don’t want to forget to offer you this Classroom Routines Checklist. It’s FREE! Yay! Just complete this form and I will zip it right over to your email.