Homeschool Student Photos

I attended our local public schools from Kindergarten through 8th grade. My parents have a set of 8 x 10 photographs of me from each of those years, lining the top of the built-in bookcase in their living room. It is a really neat thing to see how much I grew and changed year after year.

As homeschoolers, it can be so easy to slack off on little traditions like making a "yearly school picture." I've done my best to keep it up, because I hope that someday my kids will find it as intriguing as I do to look back on how they changed throughout their childhood.

If you're blessed like we are with a great homeschool support group, you may be lucky enough to get photos like these each year:

Our group coordinates through Lifetouch to have everyone's pictures made {in the fall} that desire to do so and then they work together with some of the high school homeschoolers to create a yearbook for the group. :-)

But even if you don't have that resource available, there are plenty of other ways to keep up or start this tradition for your homeschool students... Be sure to check out studios like Picture People and Portrait Innovations to see if they have a location in your area. And of course, photography is gaining popularity among stay@home moms these days too, so be sure to ask around to see if you might also be able to find a local "Momtographer" in your area to support! {For my local friends, my cousin Bette Anne is awesome... http://www.stroud-photography.com/ and my friends Michelle & Amy are amazing... http://www.phartblossoms.smugmug.com/} ;-)

Or better yet, just pull out your camera... let the kiddos pick a "not-back-to-school" outfit... and go to town yourself:

Annndddd.... while you're at it, be sure to grab a coupla close ups:

Then give 'em a little crop {making sure the file size is no more than 1 MB...} and head on over to The Homeschool Buyer's Co-Op to make yourself some free student ID cards!

Great to have for field trips! ;-)

So that's a little bit about what school photos mean to us!

I know that many of y'all on the "Not Back-to-School" Blog Hop over at Heart of the Matter Online will be blogging your "1st Day of School" pictures, but since we haven't started yet {we're gonna... for real... I promise... on the 29th} I just couldn't stand the thought of "staging" the 1st Day photo for this week of the Hop! LOL  Buuuuuttttt... we definitely do 1st Day photos, which I'll be sharing in a coupla weeks. In the meantime, I blogged about my love of 1st Day photos right here last year... See ya 'round the Hop!