Creating Our Own Sibling Book

This month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author is Laura Numeroff, and although we love her well known books like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I knew this was the perfect opportunity to put together a project I've had in mind for a while.

In the fall when Big Brother started to show some sibling jealousy, I ordered a copy of What Brothers Do Best. We already had What Mommies Do Best/What Daddies Do Best in board book, but this quickly became a new favorite. We used it to talk a lot about ways their relationship was special and different from other relationships he had. We talked a lot about the things they already enjoyed together and things they could do together some day.

But, I knew Big Brother would like to take the book a little further, so we created our own "brother" book.

First we went through the computer and he picked out some of his favorite photographs of the two of them together. He actually wound up choosing 16 pictures.

After we printed the pictures out, we used scrapbook tape to attach the photographs to card stock. We have a tape runner, which Big Brother enjoyed using across the back of the photos. I helped him center the pictures onto the card stock. 

As he decorated the pages he told me what to write on each page. We'd read the brother book so many times he remembered the types of phrases the author used. He decorated the pages with lots of different drawings. 

Because he'd picked so many pictures, the coloring actually took him two days. When he was done we used our new laminator to laminate the pages. (We scored this Swingline laminator for $13 just after Christmas on Amazon, and it's on sale again this weekend!) We hole punched the pages and bound them together using binder rings. 

This is what our book said:

Brothers can read a book to you, 

play with you at the playground, 

do a project with you, 

and sleep with you. 

Brothers can love being in the tent with you, 

have a picnic with you, 

and go on a boat ride with you. 

Brothers can help you look for a missing shoe, 

go for a ride with you, 

and go trick-or-treating with you. 

Brothers can play monster trucks with you, 

feed you, 

go for a walk with you, 

and play in the snow with you. 

But best of all, 

brothers can give lots, and lots, and lots of love. 

We both loved our self created book for different reasons, it's definitely going to become a new treasure for us all to enjoy. 

(As a side note, this post contains many links to Amazon but at this point in time they are purely for your convenience. And in case you want to create your own sibling book about sisters, there is also What Sisters Do Best.)

This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties.