Quiet book: Simple 8x8 pages

I wanted to use up the Pellon that I had cut up into 8x8 squares so I decided to make a smaller book. For the 8x8 quiet book pages, I had to use simple designs/pages since I didn't have much room.

Music:

I saw this music page and thought it would be fairly easy to make. 

I wanted to make my page look more like real sheet music so i started off with just black ribbon and a felt note with a bell in it. But it looked too plain so I added a treble clef. 

I attached the note to the page with black ribbon after the first one disappeared. The page is not that exciting but was easy to make. I'm hoping that later when Koala is older and is maybe taking music classes, we can use it to practice reading music or something.

Abacus: 

Another simple page was an abacus counting page. For this page, I poked 10 holes on each side of the page. I threaded black ribbon through the holes and on the back side I tied a knot. I put beads on each of the strings- first one, then two, etc. Then I threaded the ribbon through the other side and also tied a knot on the other side. 

I added a vertical strip of felt on each side to make the ribbon more secure and to give the page a cleaner look. This is another page I think we'll use more when Koala is older and learning to count. 

Shapes:

I made a simple matching up shapes page. This isn't the most interesting page but was easy to make. 

I modeled it after this quiet book page. I cut out two of each shape/color. The first set, I sewed to the 8x8 sheet of Pellon and then added a Velcro circle. 

Initially, I just attached the second set of shapes to Pellon and put velcro on the back. 

But as I discovered, loose pieces get lost easily so I eventually attached each piece to ribbon. 

I was impressed how Koala immediately matched the pieces to the correct spot the first time she played with it. It's not a page that keeps her attention for long right now since she's mastered matching the pieces. I'm now starting to use the page to teach her the names of the shapes.

Stop, slow, go:

On the backside of the shapes page, I have a stoplight page modeled after these pages: 

Stoplight 1

Stoplight 2

It's a fairly simple page with circles attached by ribbon.  This was one of the more recent pages I made and I used snaps instead of velcro because I found that velcro really wears out the felt. The downside to snaps is that they're so small that Koala has a hard time snapping them on. But I think in a little while she'll be able to do it with no problem.

When Koala matches the colors, I try to teach her that Red means stop, yellow means slow, and green means go. Since it's so new, we've only done it a couple times so we'll see if she catches on.

Dog collar: 

Some pages like to teach coordination or skills like zipping a zipper or fastening a buckle. I was going to make a page with just buckles and zippers but thought that was not very creative and I'd rather have a page that's cute but uses the zipper or buckle. So I searched and saw a popular page was a dog collar or even a belt. I decided to do a dog collar page. 

I thought the dog in this blog was cute but wanted to do a more recognizable dog. Snoopy was the simplest dog I could think of. 

Not much to it, but it teaches the skill of opening and closing a buckle. I thought Koala would have more fun with this page because she used to love to play with the buckle on her high chair. But I guess the novelty wore off.

For now, the 8x8 book is complete with 6 pages including the Elmo puzzle page. I still have some 8x8 Pellon so I may add pages in the future but for now my focus is on the bigger more detailed pages.

In order to keep the pages together, I poked holes in all the pages and put in grommets. I then used 2 loose binder rings to hold the pages together. I eventually need to make a cover but that'll be another time/another blog post.