Dollar Store Jumbo Dry Erase Letter Books

I bought a pack of these ABC and 123 borders from the Dollar Store a few years ago. I taped them together to make a poster and hung them up in our hallway in Utah and in the playroom in Virginia. Now that I want my house to look a little more…classy (and now that my playroom is the common area of our upstairs), I didn’t want to hang them up. This morning I woke up and had a brilliant idea. Why not make it into a book??!

So here’s what you do-

1. Go buy a pack of the ABC or 123 borders from the dollar store.

2. If the border has no place to trace the number or letter, tape word strips onto the bottom or paper with Penmanship Print Font, 2-3 inches tall.(Tip-to use a True Type font, you download, then move into your fonts folder in your control panel. Then open in a word processing program. To make spaces of the lines without any symbols, you have to type the ~ symbol, it’s in the upper left corner next to the 1 on your keyboard).

3. Laminate. I used a small thermal laminator. It only laminates 13 inches wide, so I used two laminating pouch sheets overlapping slightly in the middle. Also you could go to the teacher store and have them laminate it for a small cost.

4. Cut around each piece, leaving a 1/4 inch border of plastic around the paper.

5. Bind- I used my Bind It All, with 3/8 inch bindings. I bound on the top for stability. You could pay $2 a binding to have an office supply store do it. Or you could punch holes and twist paper clips into each hole. Or use key chains. Or clip metal rings. Or trash twist ties. Or other techniques I have yet to discover. The important thing is that the binding doesn’t interfere with being able to write on the letters and numbers- so a thermal or stitch binding wouldn’t work.

Variations- Cut apart the borders to make individual letter/number pages and include more space for practicing the letter/number.

Voila! You’re done! Grab a toddler and some dry erase markers and teach a kid to read and count.