Free Home School Lesson: Teach Genealogy with Scrapbooking

Most everyone has had to create a family tree in grade school where you drew a stick with a few branches and wrote names on a leaf for each family member. While the genealogy research may have unearthed some pretty interesting things you didn't know about grandma, the construction of the family tree itself was probably pretty boring.

Today you can give more dimension to your home school genealogy lesson by incorporating scrapbooking. We're all guilty of taking photos of family events and either shoving the undeveloped film in a drawer or downloading the photos to a hard drive, never to be looked at again. Put those photos to good use by creating a family tree scrapbook with your children that can be passed down for future generations to enjoy.

With the abundance of interesting scrapbooking supplies available today, teaching genealogy in the home school classroom can be much more exciting than a pencil drawing of a family tree. A family tree scrapbook could become large very quickly, so you might want to break it down to several lessons with separate scrapbook projects for each side of the family, and then further by generations or branches.

Many sites online have page layouts that resemble a tree much like you might have drawn as a child, and you may want to start with the basic tree to list the names of the ancestors in your lineage. The good selection of free printable family tree layouts available at Family Tree Templates and Kids' Turn Central can get you started.

HP Creative Studio has a number of kits with free scrapbook page printable layouts to bring your home school genealogy lesson to the next level. Print those pages free, or use them to inspire ideas for your own unique page layouts.

Remember to print your free layouts on paper that is acid- and lignin-free to preserve your photos to be enjoyed for generations to come.

While creating the various scrapbook pages, use the time with your home school child to talk about each family member represented. Discuss their relationship to that person, where they came from, their occupation. Talk about major events and historical tidbits that happened during that person's life and how they may have affected future generations.

Share stories from your own memories while building fond memories with your child. You may end up in a family tree scrapbook many generations from now.