A B C, Easy as 1 2 3!

Now that Will is older, we’re trying to focus more on learning. It’s tough to break the sleep, eat, play routine that you have with babies and early toddlers, but this little dude will be starting preschool in the fall, so it’s time to get our learnin’ on.

Here is my full disclosure that Hubby gets a million percent credit for this idea. It was all his idea. I was merely the facilitator, bystander, and organizer.

As you already know, Will is obsessed with Superheroes, and especially Iron Man. (Evidence is here, here, here, and here.) Surely there is no better way to master your alphabet than with a book where each letter represents a superhero you know and love. Hubby went to work figuring out what characters to use for each letter, and finding a good picture of each. He copy and pasted the pictures on an 8.5”x8.5” page in Microsoft Word, and then it was my turn.
Making the book 8.5” square made it a little easier for me to assemble since I only had to make one cut per page to lop off the extra paper after printing the pictures on regular 8.5”x11” white printer paper. I got out my Cricut, Gypsy, and a whole bunch of scrap card stock. I think I only used a couple whole sheets of card stock for this project. The majority was all scraps. I knew I hoarded those for a reason!


The beauty of the Gypsy is that I can fuse the letters together, so it comes off in one piece. Again, making my life easier. What didn’t make my life easier was when I forgot to do that little step and I had several letters to stick on the paper. That probably didn’t happen at least 5 times…

Once everything was in order, we took it to get laminated & spiral bound. Word to the wise about laminating – have a thorough discussion with the person taking your book from you at the copy place. Ours didn’t come out as great as we had hoped, and it’s due to the clerk’s not-so-thorough explanation of what you need to make something perfectly laminated. I thought I was helping by adding a full sheet of card stock in-between the pages that were back to back. I thought extra thickness = good! No… extra thickness = bad! To make the pages thicker, opt for thicker lamination instead of thicker paper. If you’re not happy with the un-helpful-ness of the employee taking your project, grab your unfinished stuff and run away to a different store.

All in all, this book is rad.

I feel like this book has already helped our little dude. We’ve been working on sounding out words and identifying letters. “I” is for Iron Man. “S” is for Spiderman. “T” is for Thor, which is an extra tough one since TH is a tough sound to make. We’re working on that because right now, it’s usually “For” instead of “Thor”.

You can definitely tailor this to your kid's interests. Is she obsessed with princesses? Maybe do a Disney Princess version using the princesses and their co-stars. Do they just love animals? Do a zoo themed one featuring their favorites. There are a million different variations you could do and it’s just more fun when your kid is interested in the subject.