Oh my goodness! We have been having so much fun with our Little House on the Prairie Academic Adventures. One of the projects we recently completed were these Pioneer Journals.

These were so easy to make and I kinda got the idea from the old book covers we used to make in school to protect our textbooks.

You will need:

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• brown paper (paper grocery bags, wrapping paper, or packaging paper)
• tape
• scissors
• tacky glue
• pictures of kids
• marker
• spiral notebooks or composition books

Directions:

First I took some pictures of the kids:

I then edited the pictures with my phone to make them look a bit older:

And then I printed them off on plain paper. In hindsight I wouldn’t have cropped them so close but we made them work.

I let the kids cut out their pictures:

Then the kids took turns crumpling up the brown paper that I had been saving from some of the packages we had received:

Then we measured out the paper to fit around our notebooks:

After that we cut out a place to put our pictures:

And then we glued our pictures to the back side of the paper:

A couple of the holes got cute a little big so we just glued a square of paper behind the picture:

Then we used glue to attach the paper to the notebook cover being careful to center the picture on the front and allow enough extra so the book would open and close easily.  We also folded the ends over and glued them down too.

I also cut little tabs for the center and then folded them under. The kids each helped with their own notebook. Afterwards we wrote their names on the front and set them to the side to dry.

They were so happy to get these made:

Aren’t they so cute? We will be using these for our many writing assigments that we will be doing this year. These were a lot of fun to make as well.