A Homemade I-Spy Book

I have been eyeing off the beautiful home made i-spy books like this one from Delia creates. I wanted to add some of my own home-made i-spy pages to the restaurant/travel dry-erase books I've been making, but when I'd finished the pages I put them in a $1 photo album and really liked it. Perhaps I'll laminate them and put them in the travel book later.

It was such a simple project. Just get a collection of toys, spread them out on a plain background so that you can see everything, and make a photo. I carefully didn't make them too cluttered and busy, because the kids find that too difficult and loose interest (see my post on i-spy bags). I then chose 5 or 6 objects to photograph, this time making sure that there was enough space around each object that I would be able to crop them into a smaller image. I then put them together with a little rhyme of up to eight other things to find.

Mr 4 likes to read the rhymes, and Miss 3 has the pictures she can match. The kids loved helping me do it. Although of course, true to the nature of children, the help made the project much more challenging. After printing I noticed that one of the search-for pictures showed a pram that Miss 3 had taken out of the dolls house to be play with at a crucial moment. The project took several days to make 10 puzzles (there was something about spreading out a nice collection of toys on the floor that meant they needed to be played with for a couple of hours). The last one we did, Mr 4 gathered all the things, spread them out and helped with the rhyme. He loved seeing his own toys, especially his sticker-reward chart, which was filled with all sorts of different stickers.