I’ve noticed that my pin about my Parent Information Pack was getting pinned frequently, but I realized that I never showed how to make one!  I put mine together earlier this week to prepare for our Back to School night and I took pictures along the way to show how they go together.

The first thing you have to do is type everything up.  My booklet is 5 pages, so I can have 9 spaces (actually 10, but 1 serves as the front cover) to place text.  Next, you will want to cut all your text apart into paragraphs.

That’s when you make the dummy mock up of your finished flip booklet.  I just play with my paragraphs of text, fitting them in where they fit best.  I start with the middle most paper (in this picture it’s the one that says Absences and Tardies and Parent Helpers and Field Trips).  You fold the paper almost in 1/2, but so that the Absences and Tardies part leaves enough room for the words “Parent Helpers…”.  Then you keep adding pages behind it.  I used a total of five 8 1/2 x11 sheets of paper and just kept folding each one.  So for the page that says Daily Schedule, I placed that part of the paper about 1/2 inch down from Parent Helpers and then folded it over the Absences and Tardies part and it became the Red Folders section.  Make sense?

Then I just start taping in my paragraphs of text.  After that, I label the different sections.  I use removable tape in case I need to move the sections around a little bit.

Next, I copied each page back to back (you will see that better once all your pages are folded in your dummy mock up copy.  I copied them on these bright papers so families could find them easier once they take them home. If I had to copy them again, I would shuffle the colored paper up a little bit so I copied on a wider variety of colors.  I hardly had any blue or yellow pages!

Next you fold…and fold…and fold each of the pages.

What I do to help me figure out where to fold them is this:  For the first set, I lay each page next to the dummy mock up copy and use that to help me decide where to fold.  After that, I look for a sentence on each page where I find that the folded page falls near.  In the picture above, “Specials Schedule” landed just about the sentence part “clipped up can be asked to clip down”.  Each page that looked like this one, got folded to the same sentence.

Here you can see how they are copied back to back…one side will be upside down when compared to the words on the other side, allowing the one side to be folded over the other.

Here they are all folded and I’ve put one together (but haven’t stapled it yet).

Here it is up close. 🙂

Now I use my long arm stapler to staple it on the outside.

Here are all 25 of them stacked and ready to go.  By the time you get to the end, you will have some booklets that are all the same color. It’s just a toss up as to how many sheets you will have of each color.  It doesn’t bother me any, so when I copy, I just throw the ream of paper in the machine and I get what I get. 🙂

It took me about an hour start to finish…making the mock up to all of them being stapled.

Kristen 🙂