Quiet Book Ideas: How to Choose the Right Quiet Book Activities

If you want to get more quiet book ideas for your project, I invite you to check out my quiet book patterns library. You’ll also find instructions and free PDF patterns, that’ll help you create a quiet book.

But before you do that, I would like to give you some tips on choosing the best activities for your child to make your selection easier.

Gathering quiet book ideas is easy. There are so many possibilities, and you can find almost anything on the internet! But once you start digging, you’re faced with so many options that it can paralyze you.

There’s a limited amount of activities you can put in a quiet book.

Having a hard time deciding which activity pages to choose can lead to you never even making this incredible toy.

If your selection process includes not only what activities look lovely and fun, but also your child’s age, interests, and needs, getting the right quiet book ideas seems much easier.

In this chapter, I’ll tell you the main viewpoints that depend on the choice of the activity pages. In the end, you will easily make a list of quiet book ideas for activity pages you want to include in your quiet book.

Let’s begin!

The most important take out of this chapter is that you should make a quiet book that suits your child’s age, needs, and interests. If you combine those domains well, you will create an ideal quiet book for your child.

Quiet Book Ideas – Your Child’s Age

Let’s check how a child’s age helps us decide which quiet book ideas are acceptable for your book.

So many times people ask me – What age are quiet books for?

We can make quiet books for children at any age, from 8 months and up to 12 years old. It depends entirely on what kind of activities we include inside the quiet book.

However, the age range in which children play with quiet books is about 2 to 5 years. You’ll mostly find quiet book ideas for this age range on the internet, containing activities primarily for fine motor skills development.

A child’s age should help you to first and foremost think about the safety of a quiet book – mainly to consider the child’s development stage at which children put everything in their mouths.

Smaller removable fragments of a book may present a risk of suffocation. 

Is your child older and has passed this stage? Then the quiet book may probably already have removable parts.

Quiet Book Ideas – Your Child’s Needs

A child’s age is useful because we can help with milestones on main development areas (motor skills, communication & language, social & emotional skills, cognitive skills). Check chapter one and define milestones that you want your child to achieve next. 

With this knowledge, you can find quiet book ideas that encourage practicing skills for a specific milestone. Although it’s good to know the basic framework of child development stages, children develop at a different pace.

And that’s why the main thing to do while deciding on quiet book activity pages, is to observe your child. Start planning your quiet book ideas by including the likes and interests of the child.

Quiet Book Ideas – Your Child’s Interest

It is so much easier to design a book if you observe your child for a while.

Look at your child and think:

• What does she like?
• What does she find engaging?
• What is her favorite animal/food/plant?
• Does she like vehicles?
• Does she like going to a farm?
• Does she like to help with cooking?
• Favorite color?
• Favorite storybooks, foods, game?

Great!

Now it’s time to combine these viewpoints to create the best quiet book for your child.

Create a list of things that you would like to help him develop based on your observations. Ask yourself what kind of activities will benefit your child the most in the next year or two.

You can help yourself with the list of the activity types in our quiet book patterns library and with Chapter 1. By adding what your child likes and cares about, you will create an ideal quiet book.

Getting the right quiet book ideas

Here’s an example of how you could combine all three viewpoints to get the best ideas for your quiet book.

Age:

Let’s say your child is old enough to learn how to button, and you want him/her to practice buttoning with a quiet book.

Needs:

If he/she is just starting to learn how to button, you must think of the button size. It’s easier to learn the basics with larger objects.

You can create an activity with only one large button. And later, when he/she is ready, create another with smaller buttons.

Interests:

Try to think about how you can combine those needs with your child’s interests.

Does he/she like vehicles and transportation? Then you can put buttons as wheels of a tractor or a car. Does he/she like animals? Then you can use buttons for ladybug’s spots.

Many quiet book ideas found on different websites are containing a wide variety of activity pages.

You can also find designs that suit your child’s interests and needs in the library of our quiet book patterns. There you can find detailed instructions and patterns for each activity page idea.

I recommend that whenever you find a pattern for an activity that you feel is appropriate for your quiet book, save it immediately. Either on your computer or your Pinterest board if you have it.

This way, you will avoid double work when you have to search for a specific page with instructions you liked again.

Create a list of your quiet book ideas and activity pages in your quiet book: what will be on the page, and what challenges will it offer (for example, ladybug – buttons, hippo – brushing teeth, etc.). You’ll have an excellent overview of your quiet book, and you can start creating it.

You can try to make your own pattern if you can’t find the combinations of your child’s age, needs, and interests in my patterns library.

If you feel this will slow you down enormously, then you don’t need to do it. Just find something similar, a second choice. It’s ok. The activity will still be engaging for your child.

I should also mention that older children (6+) will still find quiet books interesting if activities are customized to their interests. For the age group 6-12 (grade-schoolers), quiet mats, playscapes, or some other form of “quiet book activities” are sometimes more suitable than in the form of a quiet book.

Also, give a thought about other formats when activities need more space and are logistically harder to fit into quiet book pages.

Summing up

If you want to create an ideal quiet book for your child, you should combine your child’s age, needs, and interests.

You can find the patterns in our Quiet book patterns library, other web sites, or make your own.

If you choose the right activities, quiet books can be great educational toys for children at any age.

If you struggle to find the right quiet book ideas, feel free to ask me, and I’ll do y best to help.

In the next chapter, you will find out how to bind your activity pages together.