Great ideas for preserving your family summers with the kids.
By Erin Gifford
Family Vacation
Read on to find awesome ways to capture and preserve your summer vacation memories. (Photo: Kate Mathis)
As you begin to gear up for family summer adventures, it’s a must to think about how to capture and preserve the fun summer memories to come. From writing in a family travel journal to creating a personal travel blog to sharing photos on Instagram with a dedicated hashtag, there are so many fun ways to hold onto your summer adventures.
Take a look at five of our favorite ways to savor and share the best of your family summer.
1. Write in a Travel Journal. Travel journals are a fantastic way to encourage kids to capture memories while enabling them to enhance their writing skills as they put on paper their travel experiences. Look for travel journals online and at discount stores or use the trip journal section of MiniTime’s Trip Plan tool. Many journals provide sections to paste in postcards, ticket stubs, photos and other travel souvenirs, so encourage kids to leave space to jazz up the pages.
Travel photo book by Mixbook (Courtesy Mixbook)
2. Create a Travel Photo Book. Kids love to express their creative sides on their computers and tablets, so making a photo album is a must so kids can share their adventures. Mixbook has a variety of travel-themed photo book templates to choose from, as does Snapfish. Kids will love putting these photo books together and having the print albums arrive in the mail a few days later.
3. Create a Personal Travel Blog. For kids who don’t want to write in a journal with a pencil, set-up a personal travel blog for your family at MapQuest Travel Blogs. Kids can upload photos, drop pins on locations they visited, enter travel dates and write stories about their adventures. Friends and family can subscribe to their blogs to follow along as they go. Wix is another easy and free resource for setting up a family travel blog.
Globalmouse records their family travels on Instagram. (Courtesy Globalmouse)
4. Share Photos on Instagram. Set up a private Instagram account for your children so they can take pictures to share throughout their trips. You may even want to create a unique hashtag, like #SmithSummerVacay2015 so you and your kids can post trip photos, then easily see all the pictures on one screen. This is also a fun way for family and friends to follow your travel adventures.
(MORE: The Travel Kit: Turn Family Vacation Snaps Into Beautiful Photographs with instaLens)
5. Take Short Videos. If your kids have iPhones, iPads or any other devices that can record video, encourage them take videos of their experiences to put up on Instagram or Vine to share with friends and family. I love videos since they’re easy ways to capture learning and silliness when on various adventures. Consider a GoPro or Polaroid Cube, both of which can be attached to a helmet or handlebars, making for fun videos of bike rides, zip lines, roller coasters, hikes and other active adventures.
Beyond documenting travel memories through words, photos and videos, pick up collectibles along the way to remember each new town and experience. Whether postcards, magnets, coffee mugs or snow globes, there are many different types of souvenirs you can collect with your kids. These will serve as another fun way for all of you to remember your summer vacation adventures.
Erin Gifford of Kidventurous contributed this to MiniTime.
