DIY Wipe-Clean Activity Books with Dry-Erase Worksheets

Wipe clean activity books with dry erase pages are a great way to allow children to practice reading, writing, math, and more over and over again without buying workbook after workbook.  We use them in our home for preschool morning work and quiet time. They make excellent road trip activities for kids, too!  

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Any other moms out there that would basically just give all their money to Target’s dollar spot and Dollar Tree when they put out those fun activity books for kids?

Just me?

Y’all already know we love easy activities around here and bonus when they’re educational.  Little loves getting a new activity book or work book these days.  He’s becoming especially good at tracing, connect the dots, mazes, and drawing lines to the matching objects.  He reads the instructions on each page and knows how to do his activity.

And as much as we don’t rely on workbooks for learning, it’s all play for Little and they really are GREAT as an independent quiet time activity and a really good way to continue building fine motor skills and practice handwriting.

Not to mention how proud he feels when he does an activity all by himself and can show us afterwards.

But, all those activity books can start to add up.  So what’s a mom to do?

So, instead of continuing to buy new workbooks all the time, we decided to create reusable activity books with dry-erase pages so that he can do the activities over and over again.  

It was SUPER easy to do and today I want to show you how you can make your own reusable, wipe-clean activity books with dry-erase pages!

How to Make Your Own Wipe Clean Activity Books

Making your own dry-erase activity book is simple.  You just need a few supplies.

Here’s What You Need

• Activity Books or Worksheets
  • We grab ours from our local Dollar Tree or Target Dollar Spot.
• Staple Remover*
• Paper Cutter* (or scissors)
• Plastic Page Protectors
  • We opted to use the heavy duty ones to make sure they’ll be able to sustain lots of wear and tear.
• 3-Ring Binder
• Colorful dry-erase markers
  • Although, to be fair, even just one dry-erase marker will do.
• Cloth (an old baby washcloth is perfect) or paper towel for wiping markers

*Note: If you use individual, loose worksheets, you won’t need to use a paper cutter or staple remover.  But since we were using pre-made, already bound activity books, we needed to separate the pages first. 

 

Directions

• If you’re using an existing activity book, carefully remove the staples.
• Use your paper cutter or scissors to cut the pages apart so that you have individual worksheets.
  •  You may need to cut them in sections rather than the whole book at once.

• Slide pages into page protectors and add them to the binder.
• Enjoy!

It really is that simple!  Of course you can take the pages out if you only want to work on one page at a time, but I tend to let Little just play with the whole binder so he can choose his own activities.

A Few Notes

A few things that have been helpful with these dry erase worksheets has been to save the workbook cover in it’s own page protector.  I add it to the binder in front of the worksheets so we can keep up with which pages are part of the same book.

I have a separate binder for myself where I keep all of the pages that we aren’t currently using.  This lets me switch out his activity sheets and give him “new” activity books from time to time.

We recently got a 3-ring pencil pouch to keep in his binder to store his dry-erase markers.  This helps him keep his dry-erase pens separate from our other markers and empowers him to be responsible for keeping up with them.

We’ve gotten lots of use out of these books since turning them into reusable activity books and I am so thankful for it.

Here’s to not having to buy more and more activity books – but rotating a few over and over again!