Our Travel-Style Nature Journal

My big explorer is just learning his ABCs and his nature journal is pretty simple. He usually only includes a sentence or two about each of our outings, which doesn’t take up a lot of space on a page.

So when we visited Hawaii earlier this month, I thought it might be fun to try combining two things: postcards from our travels and his notes from our adventures.

To create your own travel-style nature journal, here’s what you’ll need:

• Postcards from each of the places you visit
• Something to write with
• A laminator, or access to a place that provides laminating services
• Hole punch
• A binder ring to hold your laminated postcards together

What to do: The big explorer chose a postcard or two from each of the places we visited during our week-long stay in Hawaii. Each night, he would write a couple of sentences about our adventure that day.

To make the nature connection, I encouraged him to include any new plants, flowers or animals we might have seen and anything else he might have especially liked. Here’s an example from the maze at the Dole Plantation (translation: “I liked the maze. It was fun. It was tiring.”).

When we returned home, I wrote down my son’s name, age and the year in the corner of each card so in the future I would remember.

Then I took the postcards to Kinko’s, a photocopying center that also offers laminating services. (I wanted to protect the cards from getting dog-eared or otherwise damaged over time.) Once the postcards were laminated, I punched a hole in the upper left-hand corner of each and used a binder ring to hold them all together.

Total cost: Postcards are pretty inexpensive, so the only real cost here was the laminating. Total came to about $15. Not bad for a priceless keepsake.

How do you preserve your memories of nature when you travel? I’d love to hear your ideas!