How to Create an ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ Scrap Book

To make a personalised, large Around the World in 80 Days scrap book gather up the following:

• Butcher’s Paper: This is one of the staples of our home school, which we use for decoration, for creating news paper, art and scrap books:
• Scrap booking Paper: I obtained a lot of very useful vintage paper free from here, as well as some Victorian stickers from The Works and some travel themed Scrap Book Paper (above), also from The Works:
• Pictures printed from google searches linked to the chapters you are reading during the coming week.  I went a bit mad here, but as this scrap book journal was going to be the children’s main method of recording their learning I felt it was important.  For example, I was aiming to read ten chapters per week, averaging two chapters per day.  For chapter 1 and 2 I printed out copies of Lord Byron’s poetry, a caricature of Byron, pages of the Victorian paper Fogg read ‘The Illustrated London News’, maps of London showing in particular Saville Row (where Phileas Fogg lived) and Pall Mall (where he met at a club to play whist).  I printed out photos/sketches of Victorian acrobats, Madame Tussauds’ Wax Works, Neoclassical architecture, a front cover of Mrs Beeton’s book and her recommendations for servants….this was just for day 1 (!), but it gave them huge amounts of information, in a fun and interesting way, with very little effort 🙂
• Passport and passport stamps:  You can find a printable version here (I saved mine to my computer years ago and haven’t a clue where I got it from)
• Blank postcards:airmail letters: and any old stamps you might have lurking about the house:
• General supplies – markers, glue and scissors:

Creating the Scrap Book

You want to take a few sheets of the butchers paper (I used 7 to begin with, but I will probably add a few more at a later date) and fold them over in half to make a book.  We will be sewing our spine at the end as this book is going to be used as part of the children’s Victorian Presentation, but you can leave them loose, in which case your scrap book will be a little more like a newspaper.  Using your scrapbook supplies play around with pictures and words until your cover looks inviting and exciting 🙂

Stick using the Pritt stick (we left a space at the top for all five children to write their names to claim authorship):

The How-to of a Scrap-Booking Journal

I rarely use scrap book journalling in our school, the main reason being that they preclude any significant writing by the students.  But for this particular summer adventure that was the reason I chose it.  We had completed five very heavy writing weeks, and I wanted this to be easy and joyful for the children.  That said, I also wanted it to be full to the brim of learning.

So, for the purpose of scrap booking ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, I pre-read ten chapters each week and jotted down important things I wanted to focus our learning on.  I typed these out into large type and this is what gave a sort of order to the scrap book.  The following photo shows the first couple of pages which covers our first day of learning:

I will be talking in more detail about all we have learnt this week, but you can see from the picture above our first day covered Lord Byron, The Illustrated London News, Saville Row, Servants in Victorian times, Passepartout as an example of a man-servant, and, as Passepartout had compared his master to the wax works at Madame Tussauds, we looked into its history and I even found some of the wax works as they would have been in the late 19th century.

Tomorrow, I will be going into our learning for the week in much greater detail, as well as showing close up photos of each day’s scrap booking 🙂