Personalized preschool and kindergarten graduation books

A graduation certificate says a child completed something. A story says who they were while they did it - the one who was brave about the big room, the one who looked after the new child. At four and five, being told you are that person, in a book with your face in it, does something a certificate cannot.

It is also the only thing from that year the child will still be able to read to themselves in three years, which is when a keepsake earns the word.

This is the part that is genuinely hard to believe, so it is worth stating plainly: nothing is duplicated. Every child gets a different book, with their own name, their own face and their own copy of the story. Nobody is a supporting character in someone else's.

You will have seen the version where one template gets a name swapped into it thirty times. This is not that. Each book is drawn to order from the photograph that child's own parent sent.

Paste your class list, one name per line, from the list you already keep. Names are optional - a parent can fill in the real spelling, which saves you the argument about whether it is Sophie or Sofia.

Send each parent their own link. There is no account and no app; a parent opens it on a phone, takes or picks one photo, ticks that they consent, and that is the end of their involvement. They see nothing about any other family.

Then wait, chase the handful who have not replied, and send the class to print. One parcel arrives at the setting with every book in it.

If the setting pays, the books are a gift from you to the leaving class, and any child whose family never sends a photo is refunded to you when you print the rest.

If the families pay, you spend nothing. Each parent buys their own child's book from the link you send, and the single delivery charge is split evenly across the class. This is the same arrangement schools already use for photographs and yearbooks, so it needs no explaining to your parents.

You pick this at the start, before anything is charged, and the wizard shows you the totals for both.

You confirm at the point of ordering that you have each family's permission to use their child's photograph. Then every parent confirms it again, themselves, on their own upload page - so the permission is recorded twice, once by you and once by the person who owns it.

The photograph is used to draw the illustration and then deleted. It is never shown to another family, never used to train anything, and never appears on any page a search engine can reach.