Treering Yearbook Heroes is a monthly feature focusing on yearbook tips and tricks.
Five years ago, Yearbook Hero Arielle Shansky took over the yearbook production for her Classical Conversations Community. Leading a team of three in Central Florida, she also manages an online community for over 650 others via the CC Yearbook Support Facebook Group. As the default tech person in her social circles, she enjoys helping other homeschool yearbook coordinators plan and organize their yearbooks.
What’s unique about a homeschool yearbook?
Everything is a volunteer job. There’s no budget and possibly no team to help. Most of us do not have a yearbook background and we have to create our systems from scratch.
That said, there are many opportunities to showcase families. Under each portrait, we do a mini interview so students’ thoughts flow throughout the book. We also do a “Family Spotlight” in our yearbook. Homeschool parents take tons of photos at home because that’s where the bulk of our education occurs. Normally, those never get printed, but with a yearbook, we are able to put those moments in there.
You said you love organization. What are some tips to share?
I track everything on my phone: running notes of things to do and hex codes I’m using. I can also monitor core book page progress and check book sales using the Treering app.
How else does Treering help?
The biggest thing is allowing families to upload directly to shared folders. I send out weekly reminders to our community so we get photos throughout the year. During National Yearbook Week, we are doing our big kickoff. We have a lot of new families this year, so our goals are to get everyone to log in and upload one photo. Whoever does that will get an entry into a drawing for a coffee gift card or something. Then whoever orders by the end of the month for the discount will get another entry. We are going with a Happy Yearbook Day theme for the kick-off (to the tune of happy birthday). One of the ladies is wearing a birthday hat and making a sign that she will wear around campus with a QR code to take people to the upload page and a box to drop their name in for the drawing.
The personalized pages are also great. I scan my kids’ art and the notes they write me to add to their books. I laugh because we only have one family photobook—the yearbook replaced that.
