Hi! I’m Sandra. I’ve spent 17+ years in preschool classrooms and one of the best memories I have is of graduation time. Years ago, as a new teacher, as I cried during the graduation ceremony, I had a more experienced teacher tell me to ‘give it a couple years and I won’t be emotional during graduation anymore.’ Well, she was wrong. It doesn’t matter how many children have graduated from my class, I’ve still cried every single year when it came down to that time to say goodbye.
For the last few years, in the weeks leading up to graduation, I have spent hours, painstakingly crafting personal graduation presents for each one of the newly minted kindergarteners that were leaving my class. You see, I had spent years at the same preschool where I taught a mixed-age classroom and could possibly have a child with me for up to three years. That’s a lot of pictures, and a whole lot more memories. I wanted to be sure that the families of my wonderful little graduates got to share in the memories I had with them. And so, every year, I printed out and handcrafted individual, personal scrapbooks for each and every child.
Over the years, my process for making these scrapbooks has been refined. I noticed that, while I definitely had a number of both large and small group pictures, I also had lots of individual pictures. We had tried yearbooks here and there a number of times, and even during the years that we had a yearbook made, I still chose to make the graduation scrapbook. Why? For those personal, individual pictures. Our yearbooks were always wonderful, but if we were going to include individual pictures of children, we always wanted to make sure that we add roughly the same amount of pictures of every child. There are always a few people in life that just love the camera, and unfortunately, very often those children were the ones that seemed to be featured more. I just didn’t find that fair to the other children. And so I made sure to craft each child their own scrapbook. I included both group and individual pictures. The group pictures were largely the same and, and I switched out the individual pictures for each and every child. Scrapbooks also gave me the ability to include the beautiful schoolwork and artwork of these young kids.
At the end of the graduation ceremony, I would present the scrapbooks to the graduate children and their families. And every year, I had parents crying along with me as they went through the scrapbooks. The memories captured were always so dear to everybody’s hearts.
Unfortunately for me, this process often took weeks of cutting and pasting and decorating. For almost a month every year, almost all of free time was dedicated to this project. I absolutely loved making them, but my family and my own children at home weren’t always the biggest fans. I could only hope for there to be an easier way.
And then, one of the parents that received a graduation scrapbook created a better way. Enter Rethink Yearbooks. The process is made so much easier and automatic using cutting edge technology. Every kid gets a fully unique yearbook and I as a yearbook creator or organizer have to do nothing extra other than spending time with the kids and capturing the precious moments with them. All I have to do now is upload the photos on a cloud drive and let Rethink Yearbooks create fully personalized, unique yearbooks for each kid whose families decide to order one. I am so happy that it allows me to share all those wonderful group and individual pictures that have been captured over the course of the year, without the stress and time I previously had to part with.
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