25 Yoto Make Your Own Card Ideas

A Make Your Own card is a blank Yoto card that plays whatever audio you link to it. Most people buy a pack, put an audiobook on one, and then the rest sit in a drawer because nobody can think what else to use them for.

Here are 25 ideas, roughly sorted. Some take two minutes. A few take a bit of help from the family.

Voices from the family

These are the cards kids tend to keep reaching for, because nobody else has them.

1. Grandma reading a bedtime book. The classic. Pick something she'd read to them anyway.

2. A chapter book, one chapter a night. Ask a relative to read a longer book in installments. Each chapter becomes its own track, so it's easy to pick up where you left off.

3. The story of the day they were born. Told by you, in your own words. Kids ask for this one again and again.

4. Lullabies the way your family sings them. Wrong words, made-up verses and all. Being in tune is optional.

5. "When your dad was little" stories. Grandparents have a stockpile of these. Get them on record.

6. A grandparent interview. Let your child ask the questions. What was school like? What was your first pet? What did you get in trouble for? The answers are often better than any book.

7. A heritage language card. If a grandparent speaks Spanish, Tagalog, Polish or anything else, ask them to read a simple story in it. It's a gentle way to keep a language in the house.

8. A parent who's away. A parent on a work trip or deployed overseas can keep reading the bedtime book from wherever they are. We wrote a whole guide to bedtime stories from a deployed parent.

For everyday routines

Yoto players are great at the boring stuff, because kids will happily follow instructions from a speaker that they'd ignore from you.

9. A morning routine card. Record yourself walking through it step by step. Clothes on, then teeth, then shoes, with a song in between.

10. A bedtime wind-down. Bath, pajamas, teeth, then a short story, all in a calm voice.

11. A calm-down card. Slow breathing counted out loud, a favorite song, and a few sentences from you about how big feelings pass. Save it for the hard days.

12. A tidy-up card. Three or four songs that last exactly as long as cleanup should. When the music stops, the toys should be away.

13. The car trip card. A mix of stories, songs and a few "I spy" rounds you recorded in advance. Long drives get a lot shorter.

14. A first-day-of-school pep talk. Recorded by whoever they'd most like to hear it from.

15. A new sibling card. Before the baby arrives, record a short story about what's going to happen and how they get to be the big brother or big sister.

Stories and learning

16. Free classic audiobooks. Thousands of books are in the public domain and read by volunteers at LibriVox. Our guide to free audiobooks for Yoto by age has picks from toddlers to young teens.

17. Poems. A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is short, rhythmic and good for winding down.

18. Fairy tales. Andrew Lang's colored fairy books (Blue, Red, Green and the rest) hold hundreds of stories between them.

19. Times tables or spelling words. Even better if an older sibling records them. Little kids will listen to a big brother when they won't listen to you.

20. Bedtime prayers or Bible stories, if that's part of your family's night.

21. Their own radio show. Hand your child your phone and let them record jokes, songs and made-up stories. Then put it on a card. They'll be thrilled to hear themselves on the Yoto.

Special days

22. A birthday card that grows. Record a message on their birthday and add a new track every year. By the time they're ten it's a small time capsule.

23. Holiday stories. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, A Christmas Carol, or whatever your family reads each year. See our idea for making the first card on a new Yoto Grandma's.

24. A going-away card. Moving house, starting at a new daycare, a long hospital stay. Something familiar to hold onto.

25. A memory card. If you have old voicemails or videos of a great-grandparent, the audio can go on a card too. It can be bittersweet, so this one's your call, but many families treasure it.

How to make them

There are two ways to get audio onto a Make Your Own card. If you already have the audio files on your phone, the Yoto app lets you upload them to a playlist and link it to a card.

If the audio needs to come from someone else, Little Vox handles that part. You text a grandparent a link, they read on their own phone with nothing to install, and the recording comes back to your app ready to send to Yoto. You can also record yourself in the app, and browse thousands of free audiobooks sorted by age.

A card holds up to 100 tracks and about eight or nine hours of audio, so there's plenty of room for most of these ideas.