Activity Book Maker

What you get

One PDF containing the whole book. A title page, then the activities in reading order, then every answer page gathered at the back. Each activity is numbered and its answer page carries the same number, so nothing has to be matched up by guesswork.

The puzzles are the same ones the individual tools make, built by the same code. A word search from here and a word search from the word search page are the same puzzle in the same layout; this page simply makes forty of them at once and arranges them.

Everything is worked out in your browser, as everywhere else on this site. The book is assembled on your own machine and no part of it is uploaded.

How it differs from making sheets one at a time

Downloading forty sheets from six different pages gives you forty files, all called something similar, in no particular order, with the answer keys scattered among them. Most of the work in making a book is the arranging, not the puzzles.

Ordering is the part worth having done for you. Set the sections to mix and the tools are interleaved so no two pages in a row are the same kind of puzzle, which is what stops a book reading like several piles stapled together. Set them to keep each together and every maze stays in one block, which is what you want when the pages are being handed out as a set rather than bound.

Difficulty climbs on its own unless you pin it. Left on easy to hard, each run of pages steps through the levels rather than sitting at one, so a book opens gently and gets harder as it goes.

Choosing what goes in

Add a section for each kind of page you want: a puzzle, a theme, how many pages, and a difficulty. Sections can be reordered, edited or removed afterwards, and the page count updates as you go.

Themes can be mixed in one book. Six Halloween mazes and four Christmas word searches is a perfectly ordinary request here, and each section keeps its own theme's artwork, so the Halloween pages wear Halloween frames and the Christmas pages do not.

Word lists run to forty words a theme, and each page draws a different slice of that list, so ten word scrambles use ten different sets of words rather than the same twelve ten times over. Asking for more pages than a theme has words for is the one case where you will see the same words twice.

Bingo works differently from the rest: it makes a set of cards rather than a run of pages, and it needs a theme with at least twenty-four words so no two cards come out alike.

Printing it

The file is US Letter, portrait, with margins that suit a home or school printer. Print it single sided to hand pages out, or double sided and staple down the left edge for something closer to a book.

The answer pages are deliberately printed without frames. They are half the pages in a book with answers included, and a full page of line art on a sheet nobody looks at twice is a noticeable amount of ink for nothing. If you would rather not print them at all, turn answers off and they are never generated.

Everything here is free to print and use at home or in a classroom, as many copies as you need. Selling what you make, or including it in something you sell, is a different matter and is not covered.