New Year’s Time Capsule Tradition

Create a fun family keepsake with kids for the New Year with this simple time capsule idea, filled with memories, drawings and fun questionnaires! This is a really fun activity for the New Year period and is easy for everyone to get involved.

This new year we are starting a new family tradition of compiling an annual time capsule filled with little keepsakes to help us remember what stages the children are at and our particular best memories of the year that has just past.

It could make a great activity to do on New Year’s eve or day when family and friends are around. Get everyone involved and include as much or as little as you like in the capsule, adapting the idea to suit your own family.

I explained to the girls that we were going to take a “snapshot” of what they are like at the end of 2013 and that it would be a quick and simple activity to collate some information and pop it into a bottle to lock away and open again one day in the future.

First of all I gave them all a little pieces of card with a simple frame drawn around it and asked them to draw their own self portrait. I then dated it and added their ages and names. I absolutely love kids’ drawings and what they tell us about their stages of development!

Then I gave them a very simple and easy questionnaire to fill out asking them some questions about their favourites colours, foods, books, tv shows etc. My eldest was able to complete this by herself and my 3 year old dictated her answers to me. For baby Bean we all talked about what we thought her answers would be and I wrote them down.

Last of all I drew around the outlines of their hands, overlapping them to show the contrasting sizes. After the photo was taken I wrote their names by each hand outline in corresponding colours, and added their exact ages.

We then rolled all of these up and dropped them through the neck of the recycled drinks bottle. I tucked our Christmas family photo inside too and my own list of my favourite events and memories of 2013, then we sealed it up and we are going to store it in the loft until one day when we choose to open it! We can cut off the bottom of the bottle to get the papers back out again.

We will do the same things again next year and then one day we will stick all of the drawings, handprints and questionaries into a large memory book, looking through the changes they make each year! A 10 minute activity each year that can end up with a lovely keepsake memento for the future.

Do you do anything to mark the changing years? Please share!