Valeria Out Loud

Created the first gift of the big Disney Trip reveal!! 

I made these coloring binders for my girls before, for our last trip. My kids LOVE to color, doodle and free draw. These books ended up being a savior many times on our last trip, and felt that it’s a great idea to share if you have little coloring fiends, too!  

Initially, on our last trip, my thought was to make these books so they had an activity for the airplane. Not thinking they’d come out of their backpacks again. Boy, was I wrong! My oldest is an early riser, and I mean EARLY!  Before bedtime every night after the first, we set up the hotel room table, or vanity, as a coloring station. All her special crayons, coloring pencils and markers (washable) set up along with these books and a super cozy chair. As she would be the first to wake up, she would go right to coloring station and not disturb her baby sister..or Mommy and Daddy!  It worked for both of them by night three! Some mornings we were able to sleep in because they would get so caught up in coloring.. This, is a GOOD thing as we are not happy waking up early on vacation (even if the parks are empty!).  And, to my greatest surprise, the books still make an appearance when we go out.

They were adorable Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse themed books, but I couldn’t make the new ones the same. This go around, I still added in Mickey and Minnie as the feature characters, but, also, their other favorites; even some not from Disney. AND, I created and added in activity/puzzle pages, too.  There are connect the dots, riddles, word searches, find the difference, and TIC TAC TOE mixed in among the coloring pages!

The Book:  There are a lot of binders out there. Find the slimmest binders you can-  about ¼ – ½ inch, not so flexible backing with a presentation window in the front. This way you can create a personalized page in the front, add in a ton of pages as you need, and it’s not too flexible the child can’t use them.

The binders last time were similar; slim, window front, and flexible. Except the binder system wasn’t the metal clasp click into place type as this one is. The binders were fine, but ended up too flexible than they needed to be. The kids couldn’t just take them on their laps to color, so that sort of stunk for us on the go. These newer binders should fit our needs this trip for sure!

The pages: There are a lot of sites out there to find these free coloring and activity pages.  I searched pinterest, google, and bing.  Here are the ones I found to be the best for this type of project:
– http://www.coloring-book.info
– http://www.coloringpages.net
– http://www.printactivities.com
– http://www.attentionworksheets.com (under spot the difference)
– http://www.cartoonwatcher.com/phineas-and-ferb/phineas-and-ferb-coloring-pages/phineas-and-ferb-activity-page.gif

To match the sheets from the different websites, I created a file in Microsoft Word to format them. Also, they are all together to print at once. SUPER easy!!  All you have to do is find the coloring or activity page you like, copy it, then paste it into the word file.  Resize it to fit the page if you like.  I suggest to align the image slightly more to the right so there is space for your child to fully color and there is room for the three hole punches. Print one side per image, three hole punch, add into the binder

..and DONE!