The Real Things Busy Book

A printable busy book for children about 3 to 5, with a grown-up guide for every activity.

A busy book (or busy binder) is a folder of pages your child plays with: sorting, matching, counting and tracing picture cards on boards, for five or ten quiet minutes at a time. This one is built to fix the two things parents most often find hard about printable busy binders: the set-up, and pages that are too easy for one child and too hard for another.

Set up in an evening, no laminator

• Every card is a straight-edged rectangle, and the cards touch, so one cut separates two cards. A 12-card sheet is 9 straight cuts. The print list tells you, for every activity, which pages to print, on what paper, how many cards and how many cuts (148 cuts for the whole book; the quick start set of three activities is 29).
• No laminator and no Velcro needed. Boards go into clear sheet protectors in a ring binder; cards rest on top; a dry-erase pen wipes off the sleeve. You can still laminate if you want it to last for years.
• Every card has a numbered corner tag, so mixed-up cards sort back to their activity in seconds.
• Every activity has a "no cutting today?" way to play with the uncut sheet.

Three ways to play every activity

Each activity has three levels, played with the same pages: Just starting (about 3), Getting there (about 4) and Ready for more (about 5). The grown-up page for each one says exactly how to make it easier or harder, what to say, what to do if they get stuck, and how to play it with real things from around the house. It also shows the finished board, which doubles as the answer.

Realistic pictures, not cartoons

The food, clothes and toys are realistic, photo-style pictures on white, so the lemon on the card looks like the lemon in your fruit bowl. The animals, the weather scenes and the puzzles are real photographs from public-domain collections (USDA, NOAA, US Fish and Wildlife Service and others), credited at the back.

The 15 activities

1. Colour Baskets: sort 18 pictures into six colour baskets.
2. Find the Shadow: match 12 pictures to their shadows.
3. Big, Middle, Small: three pictures at three sizes.
4. Find the Pair: print the sheet twice for matching and the memory game.
5. Farm, Sea or Sky?: 18 animal photos to sort, plus two tricky ones (a duck and a penguin).
6. Dress for the Weather: clothes for sunny, rainy and snowy days.
7. Can We Eat It?: foods and things that aren't food.
8. Odd One Out: six rows to circle.
9. What Comes Next?: five picture patterns.
10. Count and Clip: ten counting cards, 1 to 10, for a clothes peg.
11. Hop to Ten: put number cards 1 to 10 on stepping stones, with and without numbers.
12. Which Has More?: five rows to compare.
13. Follow the Path: eight tracing paths, wide and harder.
14. First Sounds: 16 letters and 16 pictures that start with their sound.
15. Picture Puzzles: four photos to cut into 3, 4, 6 and 9 pieces, with faint "ghost" boards to build on.

Also inside

• Start-here pages: what a busy book is, a shopping list with US and UK names (card stock or card, sheet protectors or punched pockets), how to choose a level, a few of the CDC's milestones for ages 3, 4 and 5, and how to play together.
• An "I can do it!" chart, a binder cover to slide into the front, and a page that tells you where a stray card belongs.

What you get

Two PDFs of the same 61-page book: one for US Letter and one for A4, with the same page numbers. Print in colour at 100% ("actual size"): boards on plain paper, cards on card stock. You will need scissors (or a paper trimmer), a ring binder with clear sleeves, a dry-erase pen, and clothes pegs for Count and Clip. This is a digital download: nothing is posted. Print as many copies as you like for the children in your own home.

The cut-out cards (and Velcro dots, if you use them) are small pieces and a choking hazard: keep them away from children under 3.