Homeschool Yearbook suggestions

[Teresa in GA]

I need some ideas and suggestions for our homeschool group's yearbook. For those of you who've done this, how do you involve or incorporate all the kids? How do you organize or structure the activity/meetings? How frequently do you meet and what do you do while meeting? How do you hold the kids accountable for their assignments?

 

Last year we started out with great aspirations with a group of about 12 teenagers (ages 12-17), but it quickly fell through due to many problems, such as the kids having too much time unsupervised during meetings, too much time lapsing between meetings and not completing assignments on time. Plus, we had a wide variety of computer knowledge and know-how between the kids too.

 

We tried to have several teams who worked on a specific job, taking photos, setting up the page layout, adding captions, and editing the final page. But subsequent teams had to wait for the previous team to finish what they were doing before they could do their job, which caused a lot of wasted time, frustration and confusion.

 

OK, so how do you do it? What has worked for you guys?

[PeterPan]

I'll give you a little bump here. The co-op group my dd participated in last year had a very successful yearbook. It was a large co-op, though I'm not sure about the number of kids who worked on the yearbook. Anyway, they didn't divide by task the way you said. Instead they chose an overall theme for the book and then assigned pages to each individual. So each person was responsible for all the aspects of their assigned pages.

 

They used a traditional yearbook company, which allowed them to have access to work on the pages at home using the publisher's online software and the group account. That also allowed the yearbook teacher and students to see what progress was being made and check the work of the others. I think someone else on the boards here mentioned doing their yearbook through Blurb. You wouldn't get that online access, but there's probably a way to make it work.

 

The yearbook was a LOT of work. I know dd worked on it several hours a week to keep up with her layouts, and she showed up early to go around to other classes and take pictures. I think they all made rounds taking pictures throughout the year, then they pooled the pictures and could draw from them to make their pages. At least that's what I *think* they did. They also had several work days this summer to pull it together.

 

When you go through a traditional yearbook company, the representative for the company can do a workshop showing you and your students how the software works, etc.