The winter break always comes with the temptation to kick back, relax, and recharge to prepare for the new year and the challenges ahead. While everyone, including yearbook staff, should take this opportunity and enjoy themselves, you should also keep your eyes and ears open for stories and ideas that would perfectly fit your yearbook. Here’s how you can stay productive during winter break.

Pre-break Planning

The holiday break can also be the ideal time to really make your yearbook staff into a team. In the run-up to the holidays look at some fun activities you can do either in school or outside it to really make your team cohesive: you could decorate your yearbook room together, perfect if you’ll need to come in over the holidays to do some work, or run a small gift or dessert exchange. A happy and friendly team will always produce a better yearbook.

As the winter break approaches, it’s essential to make sure you and your yearbook staff know their page goals for December and January. This could be the pages you want to send in before the break, or planning the ones that need to come in as soon as you’re all back together.

During the Holidays

Perhaps one of the best yearbook tips, or just tips in general, especially during the holidays, is to plan your time well and set small goals. Your yearbook staff deserves to relax as well, and stressing over approaching deadlines for the holiday period isn’t going to help you enjoy yourself and get ready for the new year.

It can be as simple as collecting a sample of holiday photos and short stories to create a winter break collage, or can even be a more detailed study of school trips or sports tours. Anything that really brings together the feeling of school community is worth at least reading into and seeing if it fits with your yearbook’s theme. You may also want to take the quieter time over the holidays to get additional inspiration for your yearbook.

One great yearbook tip is to always remember that your role is to give all students an insight into what has been happening throughout the year. This means that as yearbook staff, you’ll want to keep on top of as many of the different winter trips and plans as you can to really give a snapshot into the full school year.

After the Winter Break

For many schools, January can be a reasonably slow month in terms of activities. It makes it a great time of the year to catch up on some of the larger yearbook spreads that may have fallen to the wayside earlier in the process. 

After the winter break is also a great time to ensure that you have your yearbook publisher lined up. At YearbookLife, we make the yearbook process easy. With easy-to-use design software, free webinar training, great customer care and technical support assistance, we provide you with all the resources to simplify the yearbook process. Already designing your book in a graphic design software? Then our Print Ready plan is for you! Request a free quote for your yearbook by clicking here today.