First Words Picture Books

Whether your child is just learning to identify objects or just learning to spell, this book is a homerun. All you need to get started is a camera, some of your child's favorite things, and alphabet letters (like the ones in Scrabble or magnetic letters). The basic concept of the book is that each page contains a picture and the spelling of an object that's familiar to your child, but why stop there? The possibilities are endless! The best part is that you can customize the content based on your child's interests, age, gender and preferences. A few more themes that I thought of:

• Colors
• Animals (could be broken into 'safari animals,' 'ocean animals,' 'farm animals'...)
• Foods (might be an interesting way to get them to eat more veggies!)
• Places (going to the beach? why not snap pictures of what to pack or what you'll see?)
• Seasons (what you need and what you can do during the Winter, for example)
• People (live far from family? why not show pictures of family members with their names so the kiddos are already comfortable and familiar when you visit?)

The obvious cost here is in the production of the book, but it doesn't have to be that expensive! Websites like http://www.snapfish.com/ offer flipbooks (from $4.99) to hardback books (from $11.99), but if you have a color photo printer, print the pages yourself and take them to Kinkos to be bound into a spiral book with a plastic report cover and thick-paper backing. The benefit of having a company print the book for you is that you have many more options for layouts (with drag-and-drop simplicity), but you also have to factor in tax and shipping into the price.

Here are a few pictures of what your book could look like:

Cute, right?! Have any more ideas for themes? I'd love to hear them!

I came across this idea in Cookie Magazine, but the original idea is from Sara Hicks Malone of http://www.partyperfectblog.blogspot.com/.