Their own holiday guide

When you're planning the family holiday, always involve your children right from the start. Help them to produce their own travel guide from postcards, photographs and newspaper and magazine cuttings. They can start it before you go, have fun with it while you are away, and finish it to keep as a fine souvenir on their return.

Before you go away somewhere new on holiday, the chances are that you have taken the trouble to find out quite a lot about the hotel, the countryside, and what there is for you and the children to do locally. There are plenty of travel brochures for adults, and you can always get information from travel agents, newspapers and magazines, maps, and by talking to friends — but what about the children? You are their source of information, and unless you take the trouble to involve them in the family holiday from the start, they won't have any idea of what to expect. Like you, they will have been looking forward to their holiday for some time — anticipating having you to themselves in a happy holiday mood without the daily routine problems, and probably in a generous frame of mind! But details of the journey and the places they are going to visit, they will only know if you tell them. And if you don't, they may have all sorts of wrong ideas and end up disappointed.

Involve the children in your holiday plans from the earliest stage and if you want to make sure that they understand what's going on and feel part of it, help them to make their own travel guide. Start with the cover; this could be an old file or a school exercise book into which new sheets can be put. Alternatively, make a colorful folder yourselves from two pieces of cardboard and sheets of colored paper: the cardboard covers need to be larger than the inside sheets. Make two holes at the top and bottom of the left-hand side of the covers and sheets and thread a cord through to keep the album together.

What goes into your family holiday guide must be decided by all of you, and it could be a nice way of filling in time on rainy Sunday afternoons long before your holiday begins. Information for your brochure can come from magazines, newspapers, old maps and hotel and travel leaflets. Even old photographs if you can spare them. Anything that is appropriate to where you are going and what you are going to do and — most important — reflects the interests and wishes of the children. You can also trace off drawings from books, and copy in text by hand.

Start your guide with a plan of the route (an old map or a tracing will do equally well) and a brief resume of the places you will pass through written in by hand. You may find an encyclopedia a useful source of information, though younger children will be more interested in "Where is our first stop?" than the number of inhabitants per town! Titbits like "Brighton is famous for its rock" are guaranteed to capture the imagination!

Leave the left-hand pages of the album blank for sticking in postcards, admission tickets and other souvenirs collected on your travels, and for a daily "log" which members of the family can take turns to write.

Most children love to make their own collections, and the particular item each one has decided on for this holiday could be noted in the album ... when you are home again, the child with the best collection could be given a small prize. Nature offers collectors a great treasure house free in the form of different grasses, unusual plant leaves, beach pebbles, and so on. Or, if the children are prepared to delve into their pocket money, there are regional specialties here and abroad such as corn dollies from East Anglia, witch dolls from Cornwall, Dutch wooden clogs, Spanish bullfight posters and series of match boxes.

Talking of pocket money, if you are going abroad for your holidays, you can include a valuable page of currency information in the family guide, with a conversion table, projected rates of exchange, and even a few translations of simple phrases about shopping in the relevant languages. Leave plenty of pages for the highlight of the album — the holiday snapshots!