I love Pinterest. It’s a self-curated search engine for your own specific interests. Lots of parents use it for craft activities, recipes, or home decor ideas. But with the additional challenges adopters face, Pinterest is a great place to file all the useful adoption resources you find online so that you can find them again when you need them.

How I use Pinterest

When I open Pinterest, this is what I see: all the resources I’ve saved on topics that are relevant to our family. You can also set up private boards if you want to keep birthday present ideas secret, or don’t need your friends in Adoptionland to know the full extent of your Sherlock obsession (ahem).

Perhaps you've dabbled in Pinterest a bit and decided it's not for you. But if you're not using it to mine for adoption resources, you might be missing a trick. Click To Tweet

How to get started on Pinterest

There’s loads of good stuff there for the searching. Want occupational therapy ideas that could help your child to self-regulate? No problem. Want to know what to pack when taking an adopted child on holiday? That’s there too. Book ideas for adoptive families – both adults and children? Yep. Resources for your child’s teachers? Mmm-hmm.

Yes, I pin my own resources for others to use. But I also pin all kinds of stuff from other blogs and websites so I have a bank of resources to explore. I have the Pinterest extension added to Chrome (click here to do that super-easily) so when I see something I want to save, I just click the Pinterest logo in the top right of my browser window (see picture) and it asks me which board I’d like to save it to.

Pinterest is a great place to file all the useful adoption resources you find online so that you can find them again when you need them. Click To Tweet

Pinning

Many bloggers have Pinterest-friendly images on their posts to make it easy for you to pin them. They’ll usually be something along these lines:

   

  

This shape is optimised for Pinterest (a 3:2 height:width ratio) that means they display more easily within the site. It’s likely that the image is set up for you (as these are) with a link to the relevant page and a description to make pinning it as easy as possible. But you can also pin from any web page. Pinterest will offer you a choice of images from that page to use.

You can have as few or as many boards as you like, and pin as often or as infrequently as you like. Where will you get started? Head on over and get yourself set up – it’s easy to get started. There are tutorials on the site and if you need a hand, shout!

Any questions?

Questions about Pinterest? Want to know more about what you can find? You can start by following my boards if you’d like to see what I pin, and you’re welcome to leave questions in the comments below and I’ll answer them ASAP. Happy pinning!