DIY Notepad

What You Need:

• Colorful grocery store ads
• Safety scissors
• Thin cardboard (something from a box in your recycling bin will work just fine)
• Small magnet (thin ones work best; just cut up some old business card magnets from your fridge)
• School glue or hot glue
• Stapler
• Paper (lined or unlined)

What You Do:

1. Grab a pair of scissors and a stack of colorful grocery store ads. The Sunday newspaper ads should provide more than enough material for this easy project.
2. Ask your preschooler to help you cut out pictures of food items. Encourage good cutting practice and show your child how to follow the lines around the edges of the pictures.
3. As your child works, discuss and sort the pictures. Make a vegetable pile, a fruit pile, a bread pile, and so on. Talk about the food pyramid and which foods our bodies need the most. Is it fruits and vegetables, or cheese and butter?
4. Select your paper. Unlined printer paper works well, but so does school-lined notebook paper. Cut about 10-15 pieces of the paper the size you want for your notepad. Keep in mind that the pictures will be glued on and will take up extra space, so make sure the paper is big enough to also include writing.
5. Have your child glue some food pictures to each piece of paper. Encourage her to fill in the edges around the paper so there's plenty of room left in the middle of each sheet of paper. Too difficult? You can have her glue just one or two pictures to the bottom of each sheet.
6. After the pages have dried, stack them. Cut-outs may stick out from the edges of the paper, but it just adds to the charm of this child-made project.
7. Cut a piece of thin cardboard to match the size of the papers. Stack the papers on the cardboard and staple the pile, using about three evenly placed staples across the top. (You should now have something that looks a little like a legal pad.)
8. Use school glue or hot glue to attach a thin magnet strip across the top of the back side of the cardboard, so that the pad will stick to your fridge. You have created a beautiful grocery notepad to use and enjoy! Use it right away, or tuck it away to give for Mother's Day, Christmas, or another time your child wants to surprise someone with a homemade gift.