New Year's Time Capsule Printable: Free Kit for Kids and Adults, Letter and A4

You will finish this with a time capsule your family has actually filled in: eight prompt cards answered by a child, eight answered by a grown-up, a lid label with the opening date written on it, and a box that goes on top of the wardrobe until next New Year.

Download: New Year's time capsule printable kit, free PDF, Letter + A4. No signup, no email.

It is one file of twelve pages. Pages 1 to 6 are US Letter, pages 7 to 12 are the same six pages on A4, and you print whichever set matches the paper in your printer.

What is in the file

Six pages, and then those same six again on the other paper size.

Page 1 is the cover sheet. It carries the seven steps in large print, so whoever is running the capsule can prop it up and follow it without coming back to a screen. Pages 2 and 3 are the kid cards, four to a page, eight questions in total: name and age, what I love right now, my best day this year, what I want to try, my favourite song, who I spend time with, what I am good at, and a note to future me.

Pages 4 and 5 are the grown-up cards, also four to a page. Where I am right now, what this year taught, what I am working on, what made me laugh, what I want to keep, what I want to let go, a hope for next year, and a note to future me.

Page 6 is nine round seal labels, each one reading Do not open until with a line to write the date on. Nine is deliberately more than one box needs, so you can seal a capsule for each child and still have spares for the ones that get stuck on crooked.

Every card sits inside a dashed border, so you cut on the dashes and get sixteen matching cards. Each one has five ruled lines under its question, which is enough for a real answer and short enough that a seven-year-old does not stall halfway down.

How to run it in one sitting

Print the six pages that match your paper. Cut the four card pages apart on the dashed lines, a child of about eight can do this themselves with the dashes to follow.

Hand out the cards. The kid cards and the grown-up cards ask different things on purpose: a child answers best when the question is about them today, and an adult usually wants at least one question that is not cheerful, which is what what I want to let go is for. Let people skip a card. A capsule with six answered cards in it is better than one that turned into homework.

Find a container. A biscuit tin, a shoebox, a large envelope, anything with a lid and no gaps. Put the cards in along with whatever else the year is made of.

Stick a seal label on the outside and write next New Year's date on the line. Then put the box somewhere you will not see it. That last part is the whole trick, and it is the step families skip.

Printing it so the cards match

Choose 100% or Actual size in your print dialog, not Fit to Page.

Fit to Page is on by default in a lot of print drivers, and it quietly shrinks the whole page by a few percent so nothing lands in the strip your printer cannot reach. On most pages that does not matter. Use Actual size to keep the cards at their designed dimensions. Keep the same setting for every sheet you print.

If your first sheet comes out small, that setting is almost always why. Reprint the one page with it turned off rather than trimming the cards to match.

Everything is black line art on white, so it runs fine on a nearly-empty black cartridge and there is no colour to drift. If you have card stock, page 6 is the one worth putting it in for, the labels take handling.

Doing it with a class or a group

The same file works for a classroom, with one change: print pages 2 and 3 as many times as you have children and skip the grown-up pages, or keep one grown-up set for yourself to put in with theirs.

Give each child an envelope rather than a shared box. Their own capsule goes home, which means it survives the summer and a change of teacher, and the answers stay private, which is the reason a child writes an honest one.

Have them write their name on the first card and the opening date on the seal label before anything goes in the envelope. Every capsule that goes missing goes missing because it has nothing written on the outside.

Making it for a baby or a toddler

A child too young to write still fills the kid cards in, you write them, in their words, and the point of the capsule is that you kept the wording.

Ask the question out loud and put down the answer exactly as it comes, including the parts that make no sense. What I love right now answered by a three-year-old is the card everybody reads first a year later. Add a handprint on the back of a card, and a photo with the date on the reverse.

For a baby, fill in the grown-up cards about the year instead, and open it when they are old enough to be handed it.

If you want to keep it going

Print a second copy of pages 2 to 5 when you open the first capsule, and fill them in the same afternoon while everyone is still reading last year's. That is how it becomes a thing your family does rather than a thing you did once.

Keep the answered cards from previous years in the same box. After three or four rounds the stack is the actual point, and a child reading their own handwriting from three years ago is worth more than anything you could put in a frame.

The file is free and it stays free, so you never have to find your saved copy, it is at craftdot.com/free whenever you want it again.