DIY Kids Feelings Book

“What are you feeling?”

“What are you feeling? Don’t keep it bottled up inside….”

We love that Signing Time song. Especially Reid who loves to watch our collection of Signing Time DVD’s from Grandma.

Our third bedroom was an office/craft room/huge giant junk drawer before we cleaned it out and made it into the nursery for the baby. While purging and going through everything I stumbled on an unfinished project from a couple of years ago.

It was just a collection of pictures labeled with different emotions that I planned to put together into a fun little book.

So I grabbed some $1 photo albums at Walmart and took five minutes to finish it up. Seriously what took me so long?

I thought it would be really fun to take some new feelings pictures with the boys while I was at it…

I was right.

They had a BLAST!

Reid kept signing some of the emotions…

But I got a lot of good acting out of them too.

ha ha… I LOVE these pictures.

Now there are both the old pictures and the new ones tucked into these cute little books the boys can look at any time.

Want to make your own? They are a cinch…

– Set your kids up by a sunny window and have them act out as many feelings as they can think of. Let them go wild and do whatever they feel like. Bring up hypothetical scenarios that would evoke certain emotions and talk it out throughout the “photo shoot.”

You can also use old family photos like I did with my older pictures.

– Add text to pictures in Picasa which you can download for free here. 

– Print them up. I hopped over to my local Sam’s Club to print them up as 4×6 prints.

Their machines {and many other stores’} allow you to add text to your pictures, so that’s an option too.

– Add them to a 4×6 photo album.

– As for the cover. I made a collage in Picasa as well, added text, printed it as a 4×6 and then taped and centered it onto the existing cover that came with the photo book (it’s just flipped over to the white side).

Tips: 

– Make sure you take the auto enhance off your pictures when you print them at the store. Most machines automatically have that on and mess up any editing you may have already done at home. Ignore this bit of advice if you want the machine to “enhance” your pictures.

– I also manually edit each picture as a 4×6. The machine may crop them in ways you don’t want when they print. The only way to be sure this doesn’t happen is to edit them as 4×6 prints in the machine.

I think emotional intelligence is an important skill to teach our children, and it can be fun!

This project provides a great opportunity to do that, from the creation process to looking back and enjoying it.

So…what are you feeling today?

Me?

Anxious/bored/nervous/grateful/crazy waiting for the baby to come!

I’m thinking I want to start the weekend early! We’ll see…. 🙂

Oh and if you get a chance hop over to Family Ever After to check out the Sew-vivor Top Ten!

I got to help narrow it down to the top ten. Man oh man, was that tough. There were so many great entries!