I wrote yesterday about how to go about collecting stories from grandparents—or how to encourage our kids to get their grandparents to talk to them about history and such. Last night, while talking with my oldest daughter, we were remembering a writing project we did one summer as a family where we worked on writing down some of those stories and writing up a family biography. I thought it might be a good project to share here for other parents who are looking for a good family project as the “boring days” of summer set it…
Kids love to hear and talk about how they were born, family vacations, holidays, or other stories that make up the history of a family. It can be a great project to write some of those stories down and create your own family biography book. This can be with pictures or without. These days, scrapbooks are so popular and photos are easily taken and used—but we don’t always think about writing out our family stories as narratives. Even rather young children can help out with typing or telling or illustrating the favorite family tales to put into your biography book. Older children can be given “chapters” and free reign to write the stories as they remember them, from their point of view. It can even be fun to let a couple people EACH write his version of a family holiday or vacation to see how the versions of the story converge or diverge.
If you type up the stories and keep them in a computer file, then they can be easily edited and organized like a “book”—the process of writing down family stories can be as fun and rewarding as having the stories available for reading will be. Not to mention, kids can get in some good writing practice during the slow summer months!