April 29: Ty's Animal ABC Book - part one and two

When Koen was 3-years-old we made an ABC book for him.  We took each letter and had a scavenger hunt around the house looking for items beginning with each letter.  Then we took pictures of the group of items (Koen was really interested in photography at this time) and labeled each item (A is for...etc.)  We place each photo and card in a 4x6 photo book and still look at it once in a while.  This book took a l-o-n-g time to construct as Koen would lose interest in it after a letter or two.  I think we took a whole summer to complete it. 

Koen's ABC Book



I decided it was Ty's turn to create an ABC book of his own, but I didn't want to do the same thing with him.  Enter the HUGE stack of magazines sitting on bookshelf in the boys' room.  They have subscriptions to My Big Backyard and National Geographic for Kids, and I've been saving them.  For one, I'm too Dutch to just recycle them, and also they have beautiful pictures and great activities for the kids.  Of course, the boys don't look through them like I thought they would, so I decided to use them to create an animal ABC book for Ty.  He L-O-V-E-S animals so I'm hoping he loves this book!  



Ty's Animal ABC Book



My scrapbook supplies provided us with different color cardstock for each page as well as animal print letters for each page.  Part one of this project was simply pasting the letters on the pages.  Tysen sang the ABC song at least 40 times while we did this...no joke!  I'm now 100% confident he knows his alphabet!!!  Not only does he know the song, but he was able to identify the letter needed and glue it on the page.  I have a surplus of page protectors in my home office, so we used those as our pages, placing each piece of cardstock in its own sleeve.  Learning from my experience with Koen I knew this wasn't going to be a one-day project so we just glued the letters on the pages.



Creating the cover.




Gluing letters on the cardstock.



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When Koen learned that Ty was making an animal ABC book, he naturally wanted his own.  Fortunately, we have enough magazines that I'm pretty sure we'll be able to find enough animal examples for each of their books.  On Sunday afternoon we worked on part two of the project...just paging through the magazines and finding animal examples.  The National Geographic magazines even have tear-out cards in each issue which provided a number of examples for us to use. 

I'm pretty sure I'm more excited about this project than either Koen or Tysen.  I thoroughly enjoy researching, and I actually learned a number of things about animals while searching for animal pictures to use.  Tysen liked looking at the pictures but wasn't too excited about cutting them out.  I ended up cutting most of them out, but I did rip some pages out with the hope that he'll be more in the mood to practice his cutting during part 3 of the project later this week. 



Koen searches for his next animal.




Ty browses a National Geographic for Kids.