Activity Bags - Travel Coloring Book

So starting tomorrow, Dew2 and I have 30 minutes to kill every Monday morning while Dew1 has his speech therapy at a local school.  Eek!  Time to make more Activity Bags!

The other day while I was browsing through a store, I found a great little travel coloring book kit - it was a small, thick pad preprinted with a character (the one I saw happened to be Dora) and with it was a pack of crayons.  $8!  Um, not in our budget right now.  But I knew I could figure it out.

After a little research, I figured out how to use Adobe Acrobat to print Multiple Pages per Sheet.  Perfect!

So I went on a hunt, and found lots and lots of coloring pages for things I wanted.  I then printed them to a PDF using Bullzip PDF Printer.  Then, in a Very old but Full Version of Adobe Acrobat 5 that I bought a hundred years ago, I consolidated all of the PDFs into one large document.  At this point, I pulled up the Print Menu and selected the Multiple Pages per Sheet option - I selected 4.  And off we went.  If you don't own or have access to a version of Acrobat that will allow you to do this, you can print them individually - it just takes up more paper.  Or, there are various Free PDF creators online that may let you merge different files into one.

How To Print Multiple Pages per Sheet in Acrobat:
1. Select File, Print
2. Under Page Scaling, select Multiple Pages Per Sheet
3. Choose how many pages per sheet you'd like to print.
4. Click Print.

It's that easy.  And I printed on the back of some old scrap paper, so I was somewhat Green about it all, too.

And here's what happened next.

My printouts.  I selected 4 pages per sheet.

 Using my favourite Fiskars paper cutter, I chopped them up into their small wonderfulness.

Stacked in their themes.  There is Dora, Spongebob, Blue's Clues, Little Einsteins, and a whole set of Shapes.

I cut a piece of cardboard out of a shipping box that was headed to the recycle bin.  I also selected a fun blue binder clip from a pack I picked up on clearance at Staples over the summer.

The Completed Activity Bag!
Clipped together, the pictures and cardboard make a mini-clipboard.  Add a small pack of crayons, and toss it all in a pencil pouch (yeah, hard to see it on the black table ... sorry ...)

And you have a Travel Coloring Book Activity Bag all set to go.  I can't wait to try this out tomorrow.

Activity Bags

I was first introduced to Activity Bags through This Post at Chasing Cheerios.  Instantly, I was hooked.  As time evolved, they decided to use pencil pouches instead of ziploc bags - and while I liked this idea, I quickly realized that fabric and zipper pencil pouches are just not in our budget.  During the summer Back To School sales at Target, I found vinyl zip pencil pouches on sale for 50c a piece.  Hmm...  I'm sure they won't be as durable as the fabric zipper style, and hopefully in time we can move over to those.  But for now, this is working for us.

So far, they have traveled to Canada with us on vacation, to numerous doctor appointments, and on day trips to see family. 

As time goes on, I'll be sharing them.  I love to see what others make for Activity Bags so it's only fair to share ours, too.