Create an Animal Alphabet Book

After a recent family visit to a nearby wildlife preserve, we realized that we had a lot of great photos of wildlife (thanks to the skills of my husband). The Ant Bug and I decided to make an Animal Alphabet book and it turned out to be a great hands-on learning project.

We first spent a few afternoons sorting through the pictures, selecting the photos she liked best, and then labeling and making a list of what we had.

A is for Alligator

C is for Caracara

O is for Owl

P is for Pelican

For most of the animals the Ant Bug would identify what letter the name started with, then either she (with some help from me) or I would type the rest of the name. We supplemented our collection with photos from visits to the zoo in past years, and few photos from online for those difficult letters like X and U (we went with Xenops and Urchin).

Once we had photos for all of the letters of the alphabet printed (plus a few extra for good measure) we headed to the store where she picked out an inexpensive photo album (30 pages).

We then sorted through the photos and put them in alphabetical order in the book. She added letter stickers and glued on a small label with the name.


This project kept us busy for multiple afternoons and was a fun way to reinforce emerging literacy skills. This is a great book for our collection that both of my girls love to read.

The idea for this book was inspired by a Color book I saw on Make and Takes.

If you would like to make your own, there are lots of options for homemade books: colors, numbers, shapes, emotions–just choose a theme that works for you and your child and personalize it how you like.

Happy book making!

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4 thoughts to “Create an Animal Alphabet Book”

  1. It looks great!! We've made a book with pictures of our long-distance family (cousins & aunts/uncles, etc) for our kids to learn their names and faces. They are pretty fun to make, and quite useful, too.

  2. This is a great idea! My kids love the alphabet books that we make- especially when you use family pictures for various letters! What a beautiful book.

  3. This looks like a great activity! Not too many people have actual alligators to photograph for their books.

    And, thanks for your links! I got side-tracked on them and didn’t comment when I stopped by earlier. 🙂

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