It was November of 1999, and a handful of students from each grade had been invited to participate in a school-wide project: A Y2K time capsule, to be buried the week before Christmas vacation.

Our eighth-grade Language Arts teacher, brand new and still full of energy, was spearheading the effort. “Think of items from your classroom that you use every day, something you might be tempted to overlook, but that can fit in our box and serve as a representation of what it’s like to be a student at our school,” she told us.

Into the box went someone’s favorite strawberry-scented pencil, a TS-95 calculator with one faulty button, a dog-eared copy of Anne Frank, a chart depicting proper hand position from Mavis Beacon typing software, a package of Starburst, and a magnet with the game schedule for the varsity basketball team. Cast off items capturing, more perfectly than we even knew, what it was to be in middle school at the dawn of the new millennium. If only one of us could have parted with a Brittney Spears CD, a sacred pot of silvery eyeshadow, or the Q&A page from the latest Seventeen magazine, it would have been perfect.

I wonder… what little things lay washed up on the shore of your days that signal the specific, magnificent moment you’re in? Possibly unnoticed through habitual use, quick to be discarded in as the next season calls for something else, these items tell a certain story about your days, and about your life.

Create a Time Capsule

We won’t be tossing items into a box because you may still be using them (and the earth probably doesn’t need any more castaway items buried beneath its surface), but this month’s creative challenge is to construct a time capsule of sorts through digital imagery.

Photo Essay—

Challenge yourself to notice the things your children use every day. The way the light filters through their tower of Magnatiles, the specific way their tiny hand grips the handle of their sippy cup, the kitty-cat headphones hanging off the headboard of their bed. Without including your children’s faces in the photos, center these items in the photograph in a way that tells a story about your days. Choose a handful of these images to create a photo essay. You can see an example of C+C photo essays here, here, and here.

Video Montage—

Yes, I mean a “reel,” but a lot of us have big feelings about social media’s move to prioritize video content, and I didn’t want to scare anyone away. Take a few seconds of video-capturing items in use for your time capsule challenge. Again, the idea is to capture a sense of what it is like to be a part of this moment in time through the items we use and enjoy throughout the day. A short clip of your son tying his shoes, a half-eaten Uncrustable, a basket full of folded laundry on the couch, a favorite toy lying in the middle of the floor—these little scenes can convey so much!