When my husband wanted to take my 2yo daughter on a business trip with him I knew we were going to need some In-Flight Activities to keep her busy. I made this in a rush the night before so I think I will do one of these properly again, but for this one I just wanted to make something fun for her to do. I sent her off the next morning with a backpack filled with snacks, Pipe cleaners, colored Ice Cream sticks and this book and a sticker book for the activities in the book. It seemed to do the trick and
this is what I did:
I found a bunch of scraps of cardboard left over from other activities and some glue-pens, markers etc. and some stickers. I didn’t have much to choose from sticker wise but I found sea animals and flowers so I thought I could make a page for the sea activity and a page for the garden activity. I also had some bows and butterflies etc. made for creating cards so I counted what I had of what and used that as the counting page since Hanlé has become really interested in counting as of late.
- Use A4 cardboard for the cover if you like, and about 10 A4 pages for the rest
- Get all of them together neatly and fold all of them together in half (don’t staple yet)
- Keep the book together as if it was stapled as you need the order of the pages to work out in the end. Now you can either Plot your pages and start working from the back, as it becomes difficult to write on the back of a page once you have glued layers of cardboard and bows on the other side (activity page). If you use glitter glue like me, you will also need to take those pages out to dry so doing the back first will save some time BUT if you are not going to use glitter glue and don’t mind a thick book, feel free to staple and start from the front, then you can write the activities on a separate piece of cardboard, cut it out with a nice pattern scissor and just glue it on the left sides to the backs of the activity pages.
- If you start from the back, write the activity on the left page and create your activity on the right… take note of the page that goes with it to the right as the order will be messed up once you take it apart for all the glitter glue to dry.
- Draw a few coloring pages with open pages in between… its important for creativity to draw their own pictures too!
- Once everything is glued and dried (for me it was the next morning), re-order your book, open it up and press it against a soft surface like a couch with the cover facing up. Open up your stapler and staple three times along the centre fold (one in middle and one on each side) to ensure the book is fixed properly. (Note: Staplers staple at least 1-2 mm below the edge so align it with the fold and take it up a bit before you staple otherwise the staples wont align with the fold and your book will have a new centre fold!)
- Stick all the stickers that belong in a scene on one page of the sticker book and add some extra random stickers for free play. This is their book so they should have fun creative pages for themselves as well.
- If you are sending your toddler away with the book, remember to send the sticker book and some crayons to draw with.
This is what it looked like when it came back… I was impressed as I thought there would be torn pages and Dora stickers in the sea and fish in the garden but it seems daddy took note of the instructions 🙂
