Most kids have at least one interest that truly captivates them. For some it’s dinosaurs, for others its construction trucks… you get the idea. No doubt you have started a sentence with “My kid is so obsessed with [fill in the blank]!” A great way to encourage your child’s interest is to help him keep a hobby book about his obsession.
Instead, he has started his own bird hobby book by taking photos of the birds he sees. We print them out and he pastes them into a journal. He labels each photo and I encourage him to write a few facts and make sure to note where he saw each bird.
Other ways to personalize a hobby book:
- attach envelopes to a few pages to keep souvenirs
- encourage drawing as well as pasting in photos
- ask family members to contribute comments on certain pages
- decorate the outside of the notebook
He even took his book (which is always a work in progress) to Show and Tell at school. He was so thrilled when he came home that day and told me all about how his friends had asked him about the birds, and he even found out one of his classmates was a fellow birder.