The About Me Book: A Favorite Back to School Tradition
My favorite movie as a second grader was The Other Side of the Mountain, a true story about a female almost-Olympic skier who gets paralyzed during a near-fatal fall during competition - and I loved it, because “It’s a true story.” I had no memory of that until recently when I read it in my About Me book from my elementary days. And now, it still puts a knot in my throat as I relive the depth of sadness I had felt for her when I was a kid, an athlete with Olympic hopes myself. I had grieved for her, her struggle, and her lost opportunity to be an Olympian.
When I perused my About Me book, it filled me with nostalgia and joy, and flooded my mind with memories. It was a play-back of my precious thoughts, wants, dreams, and loves. I read it aloud to my family, and we laughed at some of my silly favorites and ideas, and we were amazed by some of my profound childhood thoughts as well (if I do say so myself!).
I want that for my kids, a play-back of memories and emotions. The play back is a glimpse into who they were as children. It’s a non-tech snapshot of a moment in time - it might be the only one, since many kids do not keep diaries anymore. So, I make sure my kids have an About Me book to complete every year during the first week of school.
And they LOVE it! I cannot emphasize LOVE enough to truly represent how all three of my kids feel about this activity. Here’s what we do.
1) First Week of School
Each day, my kids complete 1-2 pages of their About Me Book (It’s 6-8 pages long) as part of our morning Daily time together. They quietly giggle, ponder, and enthusiastically fill out their pages. When my kids could not write, they dictated. We do not discuss their answers or give any ideas. I typically remind them that the more they write, the more fun it will be later. (The About Me book we use is available here.)
2) First Friday (of the First Week of School)
Each child presents their About Me book to all of us as a family after dinner, as a celebratory activity to kicking off the school year. There’s lots of laughter and cuddles together, and also delighting in our favorite things. Then, they have a free-for-all to peruse their previous years’ About Me books. They love announcing their answers from different years - especially the ones from when they were in preschool and Kindergarten, showing the vast difference in their favorite hobbies and activities. Then we put them all away, and we wait for the next school year before we take them out again.
In one of my writing courses at UCLA, I remember my professor and published author sharing her own diary with us. As the nine or ten of us sat around a table, listening to a play back of her thoughts and experiences as a teenage girl, we stepped back in time and got a true glimpse of this 60+ year old woman’s hopes, trials, and dreams before she ever left home. In class she said, “One of the best ways you can impact youth in their writing capabilities is to encourage them to keep a diary.” I still remember this one read-aloud discussion time so distinctly, because she stressed the importance of knowing other perspectives if you are going to be an author - even if it is your own perspective from 45 years ago. That’s a different person now. The context, culture, and historical events, all of it impacts our favorites, our daily activities, and our philosophy on life. This teenager didn’t know that she wanted to be an author and professor of writing at that time - but she said looking back, her accessibility to the mind of a child through her diaries is what made her such a great author today.
My kids now keep diaries - but they didn’t at age 4, 5, 6, and 7. But we have our About Me books. We have these snapshots to show what made their hearts soar and what made their eyes puddle. We get to see how they grow, how they change, and even some important things they learn.
The almost-Olympian skier, Jill Kinmont, died in 2012, but she had such a great quote about looking back at her life after her fiance died. She said, “I try not to let it, but sometimes it all plays back in my mind, and when it does, I remember the words that Dick Buek [her fiance] said to me the last time I saw him: ‘How lucky I am to have found someone and something that saying goodbye to is so d-mned awful.’”
The About Me book plays back - it plays back a snapshot of childhood that’s precious and lovely, and hopefully reminds your child and family how wonderful it all was…so wonderful, that saying goodbye to it is not just painful, but also overflowing with joy with who our littles have become.
