Building a Family Time Capsule with Your Children

With the pandemic giving us all plenty of extra time at home with the kids, you may be wondering how you can keep them occupied. One great project the whole family can do together is to build a time capsule, filled with your favourite memories. Here, Kirsty Prankerd, Managing Director at Write From The Heart, shares her top tips for creating a time capsule.

The pandemic has disrupted almost all aspects of our daily life, leaving us with an abundance of time spent at home with the kids. While it’s lovely being able to spend time, you wouldn’t usually have, around your family, it can mean thinking up ideas to keep you all busy rather than bored. While it’s all easy to turn to the television or tablets and laptops to entertain both yourself and the kids, you might want to consider getting outside and doing something creative together.

Building a time capsule is an activity the whole family can join in with and is sure to encourage many positive memories and reflections as you find great memorabilia to add into it. Whether you choose to make one to document this strange time for someone in the future, or want to fill it with your family’s favourite memories together to reflect on, you’re all sure to enjoy putting it together.

What are the benefits of building a time capsule?

As well as being a great way to keep the whole family involved and creative during lockdown, or during any spare time, there are plenty of mental health benefits to building a time capsule. For one, looking back on good memories has been found to boost happiness and increases motivation to reach certain goals — both of which may have ground to a halt due to the uncertainty of the current pandemic.

Building a time capsule can also help with social connectedness, which can help with reintegrating both children and adults into normal life and overcoming the loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, if your family seems to be bored an activity that requires them to think carefully and have open discussions — such as why they’re putting certain items in the time capsule — will help. Plus, it can encourage you all to think back to better times and look forward to the future.

Decide what you want your time capsule to represent

Before you send the kids off to select things that will go inside your time capsule, you’ll want to consider what you want your time capsule to represent, so it doesn’t end up being a totally random collection of items. For example, do you want to use it to document this weird time we’re living in with the pandemic, or would you prefer to make a time capsule that highlights your family’s favourite times together while the kids are young?

Whatever you decide, it’s then important to choose what type of vessel you’ll use to store your items in. Although you may already have a plastic box in your home which could work, it may not be the most weatherproof choice, and won’t last as long as other, more durable materials. I would recommend selecting a metal-based container made from aluminium or stainless steel that will be able to resist the elements better. Any vessel you use will need to have a strong seal to prevent water or insects entering and ruining the contents of your time capsule.

Think about the time capsule contents.

What you include in your time capsule is completely down to you and your family, as it’ll need to be personal to you and your experiences. However, if you want some good starting points, you could consider putting in the following:

• Newspaper cuttings from the day you bury your capsule to remind your future selves or capsule finders what was going on in the world at the time.
• Letters to the future. You could either all write one to your future selves or to someone else in the future that you hope will find the capsule.
• Copies of your favourite photographs. Remember to date these and name the location so people will know when they were taken and where.

Whatever you include in your time capsule, you’ll want to make sure it’s simple to use and won’t require anything to interpret it, such as technology. You could even include a contents page so either you or whoever finds the capsule in future will know what to expect there to be inside. You could even leave a note asking them to add things to it and bury it again for the next generation to find!

Find a spot to bury the time capsule.

Once you and the kids have gathered all of the contents for the time capsule, it’s time to seal it and find a place to bury it. To avoid trespassing on any land or disturbing any areas of interest, I recommend finding a great spot in your garden to conceal the time capsule.

If you plan on retrieving the capsule for yourself in the future, you’ll need to bury it somewhere that’s not too difficult to get to. However, you’ll also need to make sure it’s nowhere you think you’d dig up to make flower beds or vegetable patches, or you might uncover it before you wanted to.

If you’re burying it for someone else to find, you’ll need to put it in a place closer to the borders of your garden in case the next people in your home decide to extend it further out than it currently is. Again, pay attention to spots that could be dug up for ponds and garden features and try to avoid them.

Write directions to the capsule coordinates.

Once you’ve decided where you’ll bury your capsule, you’ll want to put together a directions sheet that you can either keep yourself or leave somewhere for future generations to discover.

If you plan to dig your capsule up again once the kids are grown up, it might be a good idea to write a note at the end of each family calendar you have, reminding you about the capsule and where it is. That way, you won’t forget about it, no matter how chaotic or crazy the year has been.

For those looking to bury a capsule for people in the future to find, you might want to jot these down and leave them in your shed or somewhere else sheltered where they won’t get destroyed.

Building a time capsule with your kids is sure to cure boredom and encourage creativity. It offers fun time for the whole family – both while you work on the project and many years later, when the capsule is destined to be found.