This project was first done by Autie from
icandy homemade while guest posting
here and then Cheri, from
I am Momma Hear Me Roar, did one herself that you can find
here. The second I saw it on IAMHMR, it went into my 'DO THIS ASAP' file in my head (this was back before the convenience of
pinterest-seriously if you are not pinning yet you NEED to be...let me know I'll hook ya up!)
So seeing as I needed some cute scrapbooky looking design for the front of my book, (I mean could I possibly take a
plain quiet book to church?! I know right.) I called up
my momma, aka the scrapbooking EXPERT, and asked if she wouldn't mind stopping everything she was doing and make me some adorable scrapbook pages for my kids new dry-erase quiet books. She didn't disappoint:
Seriously this woman kills me with the amount of talent that comes out of her teeny-tiny body. I LOVED them and my kids pretty much think they're the bees knees at church as they carry around their very personalized "shhh books"-as my kylee calls hers.
I picked up the binders from Walmart and I chose these ones that had this plastic pocket on the front inside cover. They work PERFECTLY to hold their dry erase crayons (about $4), erasing mitt (that comes with the box of crayons), and snacks, stickers, etc. We're trying to cut down on the amount of snacks we're taking to church since the kids are getting older and don't need food to keep them quiet anymore :), so they know they've got 1 pack of fruit snacks each and that's it. Surprisingly they haven't complained once...too many other fun things here to keep them occupied!
The front of the book has several pages of Christ, scripture stories, pictures from
The Friend, etc just slipped into sheet protectors, (set of 25 for $3-4) that they look at during
the sacrament portion of our church meetings.
Kylee's favorite primary song is
Popcorn Popping so I had to add this picture in her book!
The dry erase crayons work awesome on the sheet protectors and wipe off in a snap so they can re-color every page as much, and as different, as they like!
They LOVED seeing color pages of themselves in their books too!
These were just pictures uploaded to
picnik and edited using the pencil sketch tool.
After all the coloring pages are some different magnet activities they can do (for some reason my kids are
really into these types of things right now). I found these on
THIS website and there are SO many great ideas for boys and girls.
I used a magnet tape roll and just cut the magnet to the size I needed and used less than a roll for both these books. The magnet is stuck directly onto the paper which is then slipped inside the sheet protector, and the magnet on the back of the individual cut up pictures sticks firmly to the magnet on the paper through the sheet protector. Does that make sense? I guess I'm just trying to say that you still get a good magnetic pull through the protector even though one magnet is underneath it.
This way you can change around the pictures and magnet activities in your sheet protectors without having to worry about wasting magnets or ruining sheet protectors that you can use again for a different picture.
For each magnet activity I placed all the loose magnet pieces that go with that particular page in a ziploc bag punched into the top 2 rings of the binder so that pieces don't get lost or mixed up-so far it's worked out great to do it this way!
I also went ahead and threw in a notebook into the back of each of their binders for more drawing and whatnot but neither of them have touched them yet.
I like that the binders also have a short pocket on the back cover to slip any papers they may have got from primary/nursery so we don't have to worry about leaving them under benches, using them to make paper airplanes (that would be the daddy :) ), etc. since we have sacrament meeting last.
It's SO nice to only have to bring 2 simple binders to church with us instead of an overflowing bag of over-used toys, messy snacks, broken crayons, loose papers, and forgotten Kleenex's.
I also really love the versatility that this allows. We've used these for 4 sundays now and they have not climbed down off the bench one time. This book easily occupies them for the hour long meeting and they're usually still begging to use them once we get home (which is a NO!). Buuuttt if they do start to get bored of certain pictures or coloring pages or out-grow the activities, I can easily print new ones off and slip them in and Wam-Bam we've got a whole new quiet book!
