Many families keep a detailed record of significant events in their lives by taking photographs and keeping them in albums. These albums allow family members to remember important times and share their memories with others.
Similarly, keeping a personalized account of daily events, through a diary or a scrapbook, also lets children recall their experiences and develop a sense of time -- past, present, and future. It promotes understanding of symbolic representation and encourages children to communicate by sharing their activities and experiences with others. Keeping a scrapbook or a diary gives children a topic of conversation and becomes an activity to do with someone else. Diaries are particularly effective in communicating special home events to school, and vice versa.
Diaries or scrapbooks may vary greatly, depending on your child's preferences. They may include objects, parts of objects, pictures, written words, drawings, or any memento that has a significant association with an activity or event in the child's life.
How to Create a Diary
Creating a variety of diaries or scrapbooks helps to develop the concept of classifying and categorizing. Obtain three 3-ring binders, each a different color, and make separate notebooks for tangible reminders of important events, child-made drawings, and photographs. Keep the notebooks in a place that is easily accessible for your child. You might want to start each notebook full of blank pages, so as you fill up the pages your child will have a sense of the past, present, and future.
1. Tangible Diaries
To be effective, several events need to be highlighted, at a minimum, each week. Events might include playing with balloons at a party, attending Girl Scout childcare at the annual CdLS conference, planting summer flowers, or going to the beach. If your child actually engages in some form of play with an object from the event, then it can be saved and pasted onto a piece of sturdy paper, such as oak tag. Write the date and a few short words about the activity on the page, near the object, and place the tangible picture into the tangible diary notebook. Tangible objects should not just "appear" in the notebook. Your child should be involved in the process: playing with the balloon at a party, carrying it home, and pasting it into the notebook.
Objects for the tangible diary might include a deflated balloon, your child's name tag from conference, a pressed flower, or beach sand saved in a plastic bag. These keepsakes help to remember the special event, and provide a way for your child to ask that the event be repeated -- or lets the family communicate that the event is going to happen again.
2. Child Made Drawings
Drawings on oak tag may be created independently by your child or with assistance. You can also have your child watch as you make the drawing. Frequent and repetitive drawings, done slowly and discussed in simple language, are the most effective. Such drawings lay a foundation for higher levels of visual symbol understanding and picture understanding. For example, tracings of your child's hands, elbows or feet, plus an adult's and peer's hands, elbows or feet can increase awareness of that part of the body, picture-object association, and color-and size discrimination. Once your child really understands the pictures, a "hand or foot picture" can be cut in half for a two-piece puzzle. Mark each drawing with the date and a few short words, and place in the drawing notebook.
3. Photographs
Photographs of objects and important people will support an understanding of two-dimensionality. The easiest pictures for your child to distinguish are 4" x 6" non-glossy photographs, taken against a clear, contrasting background. For example, a darkhaired person should stand against a plain off-white background and a blond-haired person would pose against a darker background. Ideally, the photograph should be taken from your child's visual stance, as though looking at the object. Begin with only one person or object per picture. Each person should wear non-patterned clothing, and initial photographs should be taken of the face and upper chest to encourage your child to concentrate on the features most critical for identification.
Mark each photograph with the date and a few short words, and place in the photo notebook. To further support the development of classification, you might divide the notebook into sections for different types of photographs.
So don't throw away that popcorn container, birthday party napkin or airline ticket envelope! They can provide your child with memories for many months to come.
The information in this article is adapted, in part, from the New England Center for Deaf-Blind Services and from the California Deaf-Blind Services.