Ben is a lucky boy as he has inherited many many Legos from my own childhood.
A few years back we separated all the different "types" into different boxes. There is a box for Pirate Legos, one for Castle, Star Wars, City, etc. The instructions were just floating in these boxes or in zip locks with the hope that they would be safe. However Ben was still too young to follow most of them by himself. So we eventually threw them all in some page protectors in one big binder.
Well, he's older now and we wanted him to have better access to the instructions. So we decided to make binders for the different boxes. The results was this:
The "Friends" one is for London and her Legos, there are not many pages yet, but she'll get there.
Here's the cover of her binder:
To make these I searched for images online and downloaded them. I would search for example - "Lego Logo" to get the red Lego image and then I searched for "Lego Darth Vader Minifigure" to get the image of Darth Vader. I also grabbed images off of Lego's website. Then in Microsoft Word I created a page with columns and placed the images. I used this site to create the words using the Lego font. (link) You type all Caps what you want and then you can right click the page and save the image to insert into Word.
I uploaded my Word documents here so you can download and use if you would like.
(you will also find the Duplo pages I made to go into that binder, most Duplo sets don't come with instructions so we found pictures of the different sets we have and made pages to put into the binder so when they want Mom to build something she can remember what it was)
You will want to download the files and then open in Word on your computer to edit and swap out pictures. In Word you can crop the pictures and then resize them to be the width of your columns. We used one inch binders so my columns are one inch wide. (The City binder is bigger, but I just left the print as one inch, you could increase the column width if you wanted). Also, I printed the spines on card stock to make it easier to insert into the binders.
We used three different size page protectors. Full page, and then photo pages that have 3 pockets for 4x6 photos - Like this:
Then many of the sets now come with instruction books that are 5 by 7 3/4 inches, so we found some pages that have two - 5x8 pockets. No stores carry them that we could find (coin shops might as they are made for currency), but you can get them on Amazon: 2 Pocket Currency Binder Pages (link).
They turned out nice - and with Ben only being 6 I am sure this is just the beginning.
Now we are going through the boxes and re-separating as needed and finding out if we need to order any missing pieces.
After Ben went to bed the other nights I built all the Star Wars sets and set them up for him.
Yes - I still love playing with Legos myself!
