Yesterday Books

Thursday, June 30thToday was “Play Day” –  our official day to knock around doing crazy things to mark the beginning of the summer! While I’m not keen on supporting the kids’ desire to shop, the first thing they wanted to do this morning was to go to the dollar store to pick up new markers to use to decorate their “Yesterday Books” – so, of course, I gave in!

“Yesterday Books” are a summer tradition at our house. They are basically journals that the children write and draw in each day during the summer. It doesn’t matter when or where, we always try to work in a “yesterday book” entry before we hit the hay. Still, if you miss a day, you miss a day… It’s summer.  No biggee!

The books we buy from a local art supply store consist of white space for drawing and ruled space for writing below. They look something like this:

This year, the kids decided that they wanted to decorate the front covers of their books to make them more distinctive.  So, after we got back from the dollar store, I had them draw pictures and write their names and titles on a piece of white paper. Then, we cut pieces of clear adhesive plastic (drawer liners/book covers – also from the dollar store) and secured the drawings to the front of each book.

Bea stuck with her traditional title, “Bisha’s Yesterday Book” (and of course, that’s a bear in the lower left corner!) while Tobes went for “Saxophone,” a rather original title.

I can’t say how tickled I was that they considered decorating their books as the chief sort of “play” that they wanted to do to begin the summer! Of course, decorating the books was all we could do!  Today was the first day of summer – so, technically, there had not been a yesterday to write about.

Our yesterday books prepared, we ran off to the splash pad so that we could have something to write about tomorrow!