Creating answer key booklets for the Ray's Arithmetic series

I am very thankful for this "electronic age," which I believe God is using as a great blessing around the world. But I still tend to be very much the "analogue" in many ways!

It is still hard for me to do any serious reading and studying from a screen, so I prefer 3-D books that I can hold. This is why I spend the time to print out and bind books from the past. 

As our children have been using the Ray's Arithmetic Series for their math, we have found it quite inconvenient to have the text printed, but the answers still in their digital form.

This is why I chose to print the answers out separately, create covers, and then staple them into booklets. The Dollar Homeschool discs have made this all so simple because the answers are separated into separate files. 

Here is how I create the covers for these booklets:

I first select the title page of the book and copy it. Then I paste it onto a Microsoft Publisher (there are similar programs that are open-source and therefore free, such as scribus) page, with a landscape orientation, making sure that the cover material will fit neatly on the right half of the page. I like to put a text box with the words "Key to" somewhere above the title page. 

I also like to use a border from Clipart Etc. (you can find these under the "design" section). Here are some links to ones I have used:

Tree

Dog Sparrow

I arrange the two pages so that the title page fits neatly inside the border, then I print my composition out onto card stock. 

I print the answers out two-pages-per-sheet, and two-sided, then I stack these pages on top of the cover I created and staple them all in the middle with my long-arm stapler (this tool was worth every penny I paid!).

I keep the booklets in my special "teacher's drawer" for easy access for both the children and myself.