Making a Homeschool Yearbook in 40 Easy Steps!

This year, I made a homeschool yearbook for our group of friends. Here is how it happened. In case you wanted to do it too, exactly like I did, I put the whole process into a handy step by step guide.

1. Around Christmas, decide that, since this is the very first year that there are graduating seniors in your homeschool group, that making a yearbook would be a fantastic idea.

2. Decide that you are way too busy to even consider making a yearbook.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 three to five more times.

4. Finally decide that this is something you really want to do, and that you'll manage to find the time some how.

5. On New Year's Eve, tell a few select people about your plan (your family is a good idea), and make sure that you have at least one person who is willing to help (an adult with a lot of pictures and a good camera is an invaluable resource to track down at this point).

6. Make a list of all the topics you want to include pictures of.

7. Now, once a week for the next month or so, while waiting for dance class, talk with your adult advisor (the one you picked in step 5) about pictures, logistics, software, and more, preferably while drinking hot chocolate.

8. Create a Shutterfly share site, where people can upload photos, and create a book in Shutterfly.

9. Do nothing for a while, since you have a lot of time until it needs to be done (late June), and you're not really sure what to do next.

10. Upload a few pictures to Shutterfly, then get extremely frustrated with how incredibly slow their online book creating application is.

11. By this point it should be about March. Tell a few more key people about the project. People with lots of pictures are very important. It should really be on a "need-to-know" basis at this point though, since you want to make sure the seniors don't find out.

12. Get really fed up with Shutterfly's web interface, and start looking for other photobook making programs.

13. Read a bunch of stuff online, and download MyPublisher. Since it's not online, it's way faster than Shutterfly, and seems to have all the important features.

14. Spend an afternoon with your adult advisor (and more importantly, her photo collection), looking for pictures.

15. Add several dozen pictures to a shared dropbox folder.

16. Add all those pictures into MyPublisher, and start messing around with putting them into a book.

17. Decide that you're just practicing for now, since you have a very clear vision of how the book will be organized.

18. Get pictures from a few other people, who you have now had to tell about the project.

19. Continue organizing the pictures, and begin to realize that maybe your idea of doing the book chronologically through the school year isn't such a good one.

20. Start putting pages together, a little more seriously this time. Continue collecting photos from people. By this point, pretty much all the adults, and a good number of the kids in your group will know about it.

21. Come up with the idea of putting in quotes and messages to and about the seniors through out the book, and send out an email asking for submissions.

22. Put together a few pages you like, save them, and make a few more, arrange them all throughout the book, decide that you really don't like one of them, then replace a few pictures from one page.

22. Repeat step 22 about ten to fifteen more times. All told, this should take about 2 hours a day for a few weeks.

23. Send out another email asking people for quotes for the book, since you didn't get much the first time. Also, send out your first "official" email to the adults, describing the project, and asking how many people want to buy.

24. Find spots for the quotes people are starting to send you.

25. Spend about an hour one day going through all the available font options, then switching all the writing already in the book to your font of choice.

26. Realize that the default text size is 7 point font, and go through changing it all to 14 point.

27. Rearrange the pages some more, add a few last pictures, and add the rest of the quotes. By this point, it should be early May.

28. Go through the book several dozen times, looking for photos that need to be cropped, ones that are cropped too much, pages with too much going on, double page spreads with too many pictures, pages with too much color, or not enough, and typos in the quotes. This should take a week or so, and should include a lot of time not working actively on the book, but thinking about it.

29. Write a letter at the beginning for the three grads. Rewrite it two or three times.

30. By this point, the book should be pretty much done, and you should have it pretty much entirely cataloged in your head. You no longer need a computer to decide on changes to make. This is a good time to send out more emails, and nail down everyone's orders.

31. Decide what kind of cover you want, what color, and what size. Decide what type of paper, what color end sheets, and what type of binding. Of course, if you don't want to pay extra, most of those choices are already made for you.

32. Get to the end of the ordering process, and freak out a little over the cost of shipping (it is incredibly expensive). Send out a final email to everyone letting them know the final price.

33. Put in your order.

34. Wake up in the middle of the night two nights in a row, realizing you forgot to add someone to the acknowledgments section, and forgot to replace that picture at the end.

35. Get your box with all 16 books! Check the books to see how they look, and get very excited. It's early June by now.

36. Wait. Everyone knows but the three seniors at this point, so keeping it a secret is hard, but possible.

37. Plan a party to give the books out at in late June.

38. Get nervous about letting everyone see this thing you've spent so long working on, and start collecting money.

39. Present the books to the seniors at the party, and then give everyone else their books. Start looking through your copy, since that's what everyone else is doing, and then feel silly, since you have the whole thing memorized and cataloged in your head. Pass out pens so that people can sign the books.

40. Watch everyone look at the books, realize that they all look happy, and finally relax. Your project is finally complete.

So there you have it: how I made my yearbook, in 40 easy steps. By the way, over the last six months or so, I have at several points mentioned a "secret project" or a project that I couldn't talk about yet. This is it.