Owen turned 3 on Friday! I can’t believe how big he’s getting! For his birthday, Aidan and I worked together to make Owen an “I Spy” book. We had a lot of fun making it, and Owen really likes it!

First, we chose a theme for each page of our book. Then we collected items and took pictures of them. We also took a photo of three items from each collection so that Owen would have things to find on each page.

For each page, I ordered a 5 x 7 print of the collection, plus a 4 x 6 (which I cut down further) of the items to look for. I cut a posterboard into 8 x 10 pieces, and used double-sided tape to attach the pictures. I had wanted Aidan to help me think of a rhyme for each page, but I was assembling the book at 10:00 pm the night before Owen’s birthday, so I had to do all the rhymes myself!

Make your own I Spy book with items from around the house

I laminated each page to protect the photos. I’m going to punch a hole in the corner of each page and put them all on a ring. This design will allow us to add more pages in the future!

Make your own I Spy book

Here are the page themes that we made:

  • Plastic animals in the grass
  • Lego Star Wars figures (on a green baseplate)
  • School supplies
  • Nature items (rocks, sticks, shells)
  • Small toys (marbles, beads, army guys, etc)
  • Coins

Some other ideas that I thought of:

  • Favorite foods (for Owen, this would be grapes, banana slices, avocados, goldfish, strawberries, peanuts, etc)
  • Cooking utensils
  • Clothing items
  • Fisher-Price Little People
  • Hot Wheels
  • Dinosaurs

I was worried that our pages might be too hard or too easy for Owen, but they seem to be just about right. To keep up the interest, I’ll have to do it with him and ask him to find other items other than just the three pictured on each page. I’m thinking that this book will be very useful for a road trip or a long wait at the doctor’s office!

What ideas do you have for I Spy pages?

3 Comments

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  1. Tirzah May 21, 2012

    You could also incooperate counting when you work one on one with the book. How many paper clips do you see? Or How many red items can you find? Just a thought. Love the book!

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  2. Danielle May 21, 2012

    My daughter will love this activity! We read those books nearly every day, and I never thought to try it ourselves! Pinned this for future use.

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  3. Bitterroot Mama Jun 17, 2012

    Great ideas! I'm hoping to make one of these for my niece for Christmas.

    Reply

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