It’s back-to-school for the little ones and for us that means a lot of reading! The kids have reading charts that have to be filled with 20 minutes of reading every day.

As big book lovers, this comes as no chore for us. But to make things even more fun, we decided to create a couple of fun lacing bookmarks to accompany our daily ready routine.

We started by gathering fiber board from old cereal or cracker boxes and fun, bright contrasting embroidery thread. I created a template for a geometric heart and paper airplane design, which you can download for your own use here.

After printing and cutting out the templates, I punched holes in the points of the design where all the strings would need to lace through. I used a 1/16″ hole punch, but a 1/8″ would work as well. And if you don’t have either one of these, you could just use the point of a nail and tap into a bit to create the holes.

I then used a marker to mark the holes so that it went onto the fiber board. Next, I removed the template and punched holes in the fiber board where the marker points were located. You can have your little ones help with this part–they’ll love it!

We then threaded a blunt upholstery needle with embroidery floss and began lacing through the holes, making sure to follow the design from the template. When the design was complete, we tightly tied things off in the back.

Little O (3.5 yrs) had a lot of fun with the lacing stage on his paper airplane design. And with a little help and direction, he did almost all of the lacing himself.

Once our bookmarks were complete, we couldn’t wait to sit down to a little story time with Big Rabbit’s Bad Mood (a favorite around here). One of my favorite aspects of the paper airplane lacing design is that if you turn it length wise, it creates the perfect follow along marker for early readers.

The geometric heart design is perfect for the older kids. Not only does it work well popping up out of a middle grade/young adult novel, such as Girl’s Best Friend from the Maggie Brooklyn Series, but an older child at this reading level could most likely do the entire lacing bookmark craft on their own. Perfect!