arabic printables: س picture-book page

Basbusa and I finally started a project which has been in my mind for months and months! You know how there are lots of board-books in English which just have a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with A, and then a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with B, etc? I've searched high and low for something like that in Arabic, because Basbusa loves those kind of books (even at the ripe old age of one and a half), but the closest I've been able to find is My Arabic Alphabet Book. It's nice, but there's only one picture per letter. And also, it uses fuS7a - so, for example, for the letter س, it has a car. Ok, س is for سيارة, but we're Egyptian, so we say عربية for "car." I think that would make it harder for Basbusa to get the link between the sound and the picture.

So, we're making our own. With help from Basbusa in the pasting and sticking, we put together the first page of our own Arabic Alphabet book:

I've uploaded the file here if anyone would like to print it out. There's one page with just the letter س, one page with the pictures, and one page with the words for each picture. You cut out the pictures and words, and add them (collage-style) to the page with the big س on it. I also laminated it when we were done, to make it a bit sturdier, and because Basbusa sees anything stuck to anything else as an invitation to pick, peel, pick, peel until she has it completely disassembled.

The reason I didn't just assemble all the words and images onto one sheet before printing, and avoid the work of the collage-making, was partly that I only have Microsoft Word to work with. I've always found it annoying and time-consuming trying to get Word to display images and text together without doing odd things to the placement. Also, I was hoping that if Basbusa had helped to make the book, she'd be even more interested in reading it. We'll see, insha'Allah :)

The file I've uploaded is slightly different from the one in the photo above. We know a little girl whose name starts with س, so I included her picture on our copy, but I replaced her with something else on the copy I'm sharing with the world in general. Hope this is useful to someone, insha'Allah!