Intro Book inspiration

[Sunnies]

Hi! My husband and I are being matched with sisters who are 5 and 3 and we are going to Matching Panel at the end of May. I am starting to do our intro books and I would be grateful if anyone could give me some inspiration! What type of book did you use, how many photos, did you include narrative or a story? Thank you in advance!

We had a 2&3 year old. We bought them each a build a bear. We then took pictures of the bears around the house, in playroom, in living room, in bath, in bed etc. We put a simple narrative - This is mummy x and daddy y and we can’t wait to show you round our house. this is X bear (name of child) and Y bear (name of other chair) they like playing in the playroom. X likes playing in her kitchen, do you? y loves helping mummy x in the kitchen - they bake cakes together etc appropriate pictures of us with bears around the house went along with narrative. All the social workers loved it. We also then made a short DVD of us showing the children around the house and then finished with us tucking the bears up in bed and reading them a bedtime story. We took the bears then on our first day of intros for the kids. The kids still two years down the line get the book and dvd out.

My two were 4 and 6 when they were placed. My advice would be to keep it simple, include a couple each of photos of key places and people - eg we had one of their classroom and new teachers as well as our house an immediate family. Think about which wider family photos you might want to include - we both come from large sibling groups so to include everyone would have been around 15 photos of people, which was too many so we chose a couple of folk that we knew would be around in the early days.

If there’s anything you’re going to change eg redecorate or change the car, take the photos after you’ve made the change or your new children will ever as where the green car is 🤦‍♀️.

Good luck, it’s such an exciting time.

My two were 2 and 4. I made them different books based on their age. Keep it simple with the photo, too many is overwhelming. Helps if you wear the same outfit for day 1 of intros as the one you include in the photo book.

We've made a peek a boo book for our 2 year old for intros with photos of us under the flaps. We've also made a matching pairs game with photos of us, our house, the dogs etc from photobox as something engaging.

Love the bears idea.

We got a soft toy too and it appeared in at least one of the photos. We did a book where you can record a message.