How to Make an Interactive Storybook for a Child in PowerPoint

With Microsoft PowerPoint you can make interactive "shows" for children. These are really cute and easy to make and the kids love them. You are also able to record your voice on them or use any audio file that you want. The child that you are making them for doesn't even have to have PowerPoint on their computer for them to use this show that you create.

To start making your show, you want to use several blank slides. You can choose this at the top under new slide layout. The first slide is going to be your title page. So this is where you will name your show. You can add pictures to this page to dress it up a bit.

The slides that you are going to make interactive are not that hard to do. For an example I wanted to teach a child about colors. I would make 3 circles using the shape tool, or you can make squares. Once you get the 3 shapes on the new slide, make a text box with the name of the color they are looking for. If they are looking for a yellow colored shape then write Yellow. Now with the shapes you will need to make one of them yellow. Right click on the shape and choose fill-color. You can choose the colors there. Make each shape a new color.

Now to make this interactive so that the child would know which shape was the correct one that they chose, you can do it several ways. One way is to add sound on a mouse-click. Again you will want to right click on your shape, and choose animation. On the bottom of that box will show you Play on Mouse Click, you can then add preloaded sounds from Power Point. If it is the yellow one that you are working on, you can use the applause sound so the child knows it's correct. The other shapes you will want to use a different sound. You will want to build several slides like this so that they have several learning opportunities for them.

Now to make it a show, which is the last step after you have everything created, you want to save the PowerPoint as a PowerPoint Show. You will have several options of how to save it, but if you save it as a PowerPoint presentation, it will not play when clicked on.

Once you have it saved as a PowerPoint show, you just click on it and it will play. The children love this because you can personalize it as much as you want to be geared to them. You can write their names on the slides, and you can even record your own voice.

To see me make a project like this in video you can check out my video here, this takes you step by step in building an interactive PowerPoint Slide Show for a child.