“A Quiet Place” Scrapped

From Picture Book to Scrapbook

I’m Participating in A Book and a Big Idea Link Up with iHomeschool Network. 

But what if you did something about that?
What if instead of it being a memory, something from the pages of a book that you remember from long ago it became an actual memory of your own life, something YOU did and captured in your very own picture book? Wouldn’t the reading of that book take on new meaning?

One of the best picture books for my boy that we’ve ever read is “A Quiet Place” by Douglas Wood, Illustrated by Dan Andreasen. In the book is a boy.  He obviously wants some quiet time.  He talks about ways to go about finding a quiet place and while there, he daydreams of other worlds.

Places like, “Under a bush” and “In the Woods on a Stump” all the while imagining that he is off on wild adventures.

I live in a house with 2 men, Beloved and Little Man, who both just happen to be the loner type. So this book has always resonated with me, because it reminds me of them. 

These men often want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the world and introvert into their own quiet worlds. That’s what this book is all about. 

A few weeks ago I picked it up and read through it with Little Man, again. This time it resonated with him as well. That was when I got this big idea.

When Little Man was my Baby Boy, I loved scrap-booking. I had this idea to do a smaller version of a scrapbook, only with Jonathan as the central figure of ‘A Quiet Place.’

Here’s how I recreated the picture book into a scrapbook.

The idea is to take a photo of him doing what the little boy in the book describes. So as he turns the pages of the scrapbook seeing himself, he is reliving the memory of recreating the book, rather than the memory of the book itself.

First I had to recreate the illustrations in photograph’s. This required some creative thinking.

Here are some of the scrap pages that I built.

The thing that was so fun about this project was having to figure out how to recreate these photos. Some we could do right in our own back yard, but others were more difficult. 

For instance, we live in Ohio, the desert is far too far to actually go to, so we had to get creative. We went to our local garden center and took a photo of him looking at a cactus. Then with a bit of pixlr.com magic, I changed the background to a dessert. 

This will be an ongoing project as we do some additional fun day trips to recreate a “sea shore” scene and a “cavern scene” turning this project into additional fun family memories.