DIY Alphabet Book (or Flashcards) for baby (or Toddler)

I had a lot of fun making my latest project and now you can too!  Every Tuesday at Design House Digital we are releasing fun, easy, printable projects!  Translation - fun, easy, quick project for you to make that doesn't require a lot of fancy software or tools.  How great is that?  Look for my new kit coming this Tuesday, June 4th!

I really enjoy flipping through picture books with my kiddos and teaching them objects.  It's fun to see my toddler point out things to my baby and say what they are too!  So I decided to make a little alphabet book that would be filled with things from our home, our life.  And you can do the same too!

This do-it-yourself kit contains all that you need - a PDF printable with alphabet letters, a PDF printable with a front and back cover, instructions, ideas, and extra letters in JPEG format so you can customize your book or flashcards further.  In short, you take picture of the objects in your home for each letter and then assemble them into a little book.  It also works great if you want to make some flashcards instead. 

This is also a great project to do with older siblings.  I had a fun time working with my toddler to find objects around our house (and people and pets too!) to photograph for the book.  The kit includes a listing of items for each letter to help you along.  Once I had my pictures, I opted to do a little photo editing and include the name of the object directly on the photo but you don't have to be that fancy at all.  No naming is required but you can always just use a sharpie or other permanent ink pen to write out the words as well if you wish.  For this project I decided to use a spray adhesive to mount the pictures onto the back of the alphabet cards.  It just seemed like a great way to ensure the corners were stuck down and it was pretty darn fast too.

I'm really excited about how the book turned out!  It's so cute to see my toddler in lots of the pages too and baby loves his older brother!  I opted to bind my book using some extra wire I had from a different project using my Cinch, but you can simply punch a hole (or several) and use binder rings to keep it together.  Either way will be easy for baby to turn pages and look at letters and objects.

And best yet, this cute project won't take up too much time!  It took me about an hour working with a toddler to take the pictures, editing aside it took only a few minutes to download them from the camera and send them to be printed.  I spent 20 minutes printing the PDFs and cutting them to size.  Another 20 minutes to paste them back to back and another 10 to use my binding machine.  All in all, this is a cute project to get done in under two hours.