Create your own I Spy Book

cars

I was searching for a picture to send to a customer and came across these pictures of an I Spy project I did last summer that I had totally forgot about. I made them in anticipation of a 12 hour road trip we took, and I thought with summer fast approaching there are sure to be many of you out there with trips and vacations planned. Keeping your kids busy/entertained is high priority on a road trip.markers and crayons

I bought some little 4 x 6 photo albums from a craft store for just a couple dollars each. Then I began staging photos. These pictures are just a few ideas you can do to create your own I Spy pictures. Obviously these are not as elaborate or creatively done as the real thing, but they were NEW to my kids, which means they were more entertaining than their old I Spy books.

canned goods

For your reading age kids, just write out a little paragraph for what they need to find and slip it in next to the corresponding picture in the album. Neither Schoo or Thatch were reading when I made these so I drew really simple pictures for the items needing to be found.

Knights and Dragons Castle

There are a lot of other ideas you can try out that don't involve doing a lot of staging - some of my shots took awhile to set up and clean up. You can take pictures of:

- The inside of your fridge
- Your kitchen junk drawer
- A messy playroom
- Any collection or group of objects
- Your child's favorite color
- The garden, or yard

- Sandbox toys
Stuffed animals

The fun part was once I had things arranged, I hid little things with them that didn't really belong. If you know much about I Spy, a lot of times there is one thing that is hidden in ALL the pictures. Can you figure out what I hid in almost all of my pictures?

green stuff

puzzle pieces
blue

This was a really fun project to do (there's no sewing involved!) and my kids LOVED it. Even if you don't have trips planned there are always occasions you need to keep your little ones quiet.