At the school where I taught before I retired, every teacher was assigned a Homeroom class. In Homeroom, the teacher strives to connect with each individual student, fosters team-building among the students in the group, and nurtures those relationships from the first day of their freshman year until the day they graduate. Today, I am going to share with you a strategy I used with my own Homeroom class. It’s a scrapbooking idea, and if you like it, you can adapt it to fit your own class needs, whatever they may be.

The first year I created a memory book for my Homeroom class, I used a paper scrapbook format. To do this, you will need a photo album or a large three-ring binder, 8 1/2″ by 11″ scrapbook pages, some page protectors, and some colored papers. I recommend you use acid-free pages and papers available at your local scrapbooking store. You could also invest in at least one acid-free journaling pen. If you’re into decorating stickers and such, you can buy some ready-made, but personally I prefer a rather simpler-looking page. Today, many tech-savvy teachers may prefer to create their scrapbook in a digital format, or as a website with a link that can be shared with students and parents.

At the beginning of each year I ask a colleague to take a photograph of me and my class, and then I print or upload a copy of the roster from the attendance program. These items go into the class memory book. Throughout the year, I add photos of students engaged in our weekly Homeroom activities. If the lesson calls for a written response, I collect a few representative examples. Depending on the format, you can either place them in the scrapbook or photograph them and add the pictures to the digital format. If I attend their extra-curricular activities, I take pictures and include those. I try to make sure that there is a visual record of some kind for each and every student in the class. At least once a year, I invite the students to create their own personal page to add to the scrapbook or digital memory book.

Since we had the same Homeroom group for all four years they attended high school, I am able to add to the memory book every year until their graduation. The memory book becomes a sort of yearbook for just this one class, and it shows how they have physically and socially grown over their high school years. At the end of their senior year, if you have a digital format, you can simply add some final flourishes and make sure everyone has the link or other kind of access. If you have a paper format, you could  make color photocopies of the pages in the book and then have the pages spiral bound. Printing and binding costs, which total approximately $10 per copy, can get expensive, though, so you might want to ask for donations from parents to cover that. You can also place the names of every student in the class in a bowl, withdraw one name, and give the original scrapbook to the winner. Or you could keep the original as a memento for yourself, if you would like. By the time your students graduate, you’ve probably bonded pretty closely with the kids and would like to keep the memory book to remember them by. Or you can use it as an example for the next group.

I like to put the memory book on display during Open House and Back-to-School Night. Parents love to thumb through the pages and look at the photos and writings of their own kids. Or you can share the digital version projected onto a screen or rolling on a classroom computer on a continuous loop.

Your memory book can be very useful when going through the accreditation process. It is a visual record of the kinds of things we are doing in Homeroom, and it substantiated our claims that in Homeroom we are forming important relationships with our students.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback to the memory book idea throughout the years. Feel free to create a memory book for your own class. Your students—and their parents—will love it!

An earnest young student once said to me, “Some day I’m gonna be somebody!” It’s the kind of statement that tugs at the heartstrings of a compassionate teacher. She wanted to graduate from high school the first in her family, and then enroll in college. Her ultimate goal was to be a registered nurse. The thing is, the student rarely brought her book to class, almost never did her homework, and spent more time hiding her cell phone use under her desk than actually participating in class. She was not actively involved in her own education. “It’s great to have lofty goals,” I advised her, “but you have to couple those goals with a practical plan and some robust action.”

Even as an adult and a professional, I sometimes get a jolting reminder that talk, even if it is confident and optimistic, doesn’t really accomplish much that’s tangible. And if the talk sounds like whining and complaining, you can even severely sabotage the progress of your venture. We all face challenges and frustrations in our work, no matter what profession we are engaged in, but it’s important to avoid becoming the bellyacher in the teachers’ lounge that spends more energy describing the obstacles in minute detail than on coming up with some constructive and creative solutions.

To actually achieve your lofty goals, follow up your confident and optimistic talk by developing a feasible plan of action and then getting down to work. If you can do that, you will be a chalkboard champion, and you will have a great school year!