Bookmaking With Kids

I got a great ques-
tion in a comment on Monday’s post about the new David Macauley book How We Work, and I thought it deserved a whole post by way of reply, not just a quick sentence.

The question was: “What book struc-
tures do you think would work best in conjunction with Macauley’s book?”

And the answer is: Lots of different books, depending on the age of the students. A lift-the-flap book is great for a Q&A format. An endless accordion is ideal for charting a cyclical process like blood flow. A pocket book, like the one pictured at the top of this page, is good for kids learning definitions (as opposed to writing longer, expository text). But my all-time favorite—because of the artwork it encourages, the amount of writing it accommodates and its ordinary, inexpensive “ingredients”—is a fabulous envelope book devised by my colleague Susie during a residency with a group of 5th graders.

The replica you see above con-
sists of five 6″x9″ envelopes (with flaps along the 6″ edge) with cardstock panels for artwork glued to the flaps. Kids glue the envelopes to an accordion-fold spine and secure a wraparound cover with a brad and some yarn. That may seem like a lot of bits and pieces for each student, especially if you’ve got 30 or more kids. But trust me, it’s worth it.

Kids adore having so large a “canvas” for their colored diagrams.(You’re seeing four examples to the left.) And the envelopes hold a lot: research notes, drafts and revisions can all fit in there, along with final text (which the kids printed from the computer and folded in half). Most of the 5th graders in Susie’s workshops had two typed sheets of paper for each of the body’s systems, and that’s a lot of writing!

Kudos to Susie for her creativity, to the students’ classroom teacher, Jennie, for her engaging and challenging lesson plan and to her 5th-grade book artists, who could draw the cerebellum or duodenum or alveoli blindfolded by the time their books were finished!

Get up-close and personal with a David Macauley book, and kids can imagine themselves right onto the pages and into the life and times of a medieval castle or an ancient pyramid, a Gothic cathedral or a Roman city. Now, Macauley has a new book that applies the approach of his best known volume, The Way Things Work, to the human body.

The new book, The Way We Work, is being released tomorrow and and Macauley will be in San Francisco October 14th. Kids can get his autograph at 5:30 p.m. in the Fisher Children’s Center in the mezzanine of the main library. And at 6 p.m. there’s a program in the Koret Auditorium on the library’s lower level.

Click here for a flyer about this free event.

If you take notes while visiting the Naturalist Center at the California Academy of Sciences, take a close look at the notecards neatly piled next to the com-
puters. They’re an extinct species: cards from the Academy Library card catalog that’s now evolved from oak-and-brass cabinets with hundreds of thousands of cards into a database that you can search from the Academy, from home, from anywhere.

Perhaps you can tell I have a soft spot for these discards.

I use brass rods, which once held cards inside card catalogs, in my work as a bookbinder. I happen to have a boxful of catalog cards from a college classics department on a shelf, just sitting and waiting, destined for a book-arts project when inspiration strikes. And I love searching out the many artful makeovers that have been devised for card catalog cards by bibliophiles, librarians, book artists, calligraphers, historians, teachers, children and others.

There’s an art installation right in San Francisco that beautifully acknowledges the bittersweet transition from physical card catalog to virtual online catalog. It’s a vast mural at the main San Francisco Public Library, created by Ann Chamberlain and Ann Hamilton, composed of 50,000 catalog cards with original notations from librarians plus comments by more than 200 patrons.

On the web, one of the best starting points for exploring catalog card art is cARTalog: a memorial to the card catalog at the University of Iowa. cARTalog is an ongoing project that invites people to put cards salvaged from the UI Libraries to creative use. Reincarnated as collages, artists’ books, sculptures and fiber arts, many of the cards are now part of the library’s digital collection and you can peruse them here. To pique your interest, here are a few examples, chosen in hopes their natural-history spin might give museum-goers at the Academy of Sciences some inspiration:

My colleague c.j. grossman is teaching three great workshops at RAFT in San Jose this fall:

• Celebrating the Day of the Dead with Books
  Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:30–5:30 p.m.
• Kid-Approved Photo Books
  Saturday, November 22, 2008 9:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
• More Books from a Single Sheet of Paper
  Saturday, November 22, 2008 1:30–4:30 p.m.

Here’s the link to RAFT’s fall schedule. And here’s c.j.’s book-arts web site: Art Jazz Books.

The California Academy of Sciences is back! The combina-
tion natural-history museum, planetarium and aquarium reopens this weekend in dramatic contemporary quarters, with impressive new exhibits and a thoughtful nod to old favorites.

My first visit was at a preview day earlier this week, and I’ll be going back again (and again) once the crowds thin out. I loved the old Academy; I wanted to love the new one, and I did find lots to like. But I also found myself wondering if I’d walked into a science theme park … bustling … theatrical … and interactive to the point of hyperactive. I hope that for children, sensory overload doesn’t eclipse the possibility of real understanding.

For now, however, I’ll table my concerns in favor of a quick catalogue of the Academy’s attractions:

One of its much-touted new features is a living roof, planted with native flowers and covering seven hillocks studded with sky-
lights. The 2½-acre garden makes the building’s interior 10 degrees cooler than it would be with a conventional roof. For more about the building itself, check out this article in the New York Times. It’s a rave review of architect Renzo Piano’s achievement with the Academy.

The new exhibits inside are equally dramatic, each in its own way inspiring reflection on the Academy’s twin themes: the evolution and sustainability of life on Earth.

• There’s a living coral reef that visitors can explore both from the surface and from 25 feet below, through underwater windows.
• Inside a 90-foot diameter dome, there’s a tropical rainforest where visitors can enter an underwater tunnel to see a flooded Amazonian forest and walk up a spiraling path past plants and animals from Borneo, Madagascar and Costa Rica to reach a tree-top canopy.
• The Expeditions area showcases the Academy’s research trips, both contemporary and historical, on a rotating basis. Right now, the spotlight is on its findings in Madagascar in the past decade as well as the specimens collected in the Galapagos in 1905–1906. Those specimens, by the way, gave the Academy its new start after its collections were destroyed in the fire following the 1906 earthquake.
• The Academy’s beloved dioramas are back—with some twists. Of the original 24 dioramas, 12 were faithfully recreated. Four are new, depicting the Namib desert, Cape Floristic Province, a montane forest and a Somali arid zone. And alongside the still and silent specimens are five displays with live animals, including a colony of African penguins. You can watch them through a vast window, 26 feet wide and 16 feet tall. Or, follow their activities via webcam and a blog.
• The Naturalist Center is an oasis of quiet with cabinet after cabinet of specimens. There are easily hundreds available for up-close examination, and it’s awe-inspiring to consider that the Academy’s collection numbers 20 million specimens.

You can see an overview of the grand-opening activities for September 27th and 28th by clicking here. For student groups, field trips start January 5, 2009, and teachers can make reservations now by sending an email. The Academy’s lesson plans, classroom kits, activities, lab programs and other kid-friendly resources are excellent, and you can start exploring them by clicking here.

Welcome back, CAS.

Altered books are not for everyone. The changes wrought on the books can seem close to desecration, even if the volumes were discarded and dilapidated, unreadable and unloved. At the same time, their transformation can be beautiful. And the results are almost always striking and thought-provoking.

The latest instance of altered-book artistry to catch my eye is an exhibi-
tion of photographs of altered books. Called the Page Curler, the show features photographs by Cara Barer at Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers in Seattle.

In Barer’s hands, the books are still recognizably books but warped, torn, dis-
bound, dyed and/or sculpted until they are suggestive of quite different, often organic forms. An over-bloomed flower … butterfly wings … snowflake crystals.

I think the photographs are both arresting and gorgeous. But for a variety of opinion, take a look at the comments on the store’s Book Patrol blog.

Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers has 12 of Barer’s photographs on display through October 31st and you can see more images at the online version of the exhibition here. The Book Patrol post will also point you to several interesting links about Barer. Congratulations to Wessel & Lieberman on another fascinating show.

It’s almost time for one of my favorite events of the year, the Big Book Sale. This year’s blowout, from Wednesday September 24th through Sunday September 28th, features tens of thousands of books, most priced from $1 to $5. And on the last day, the price drops to $1 on everything that’s left.

It’s an opportunity to pick up extra books for your classroom, stockpile surprise gifts for student-of-the-week or collect dilapidated volumes to use in altered-book projects.

All proceeds from the Big Book Sale go to the San Francisco Public Library for programs that promote literacy for children, teens and adults. Kudos to Friends of the San Francisco Public Library for the herculean effort involved in mounting this event!

MotherReader, a terrific blog that’s mostly about books for kids but with digressions aplenty, has recently introduced a new feature called ABC Storytime. Each post in the series lists books, songs, rhymes and fingerplays, all related to a given letter of the alphabet. It’s aimed at preschool teachers, parents and librarians, but the program could work well in kindergarten, too.

ABC Storytime started on September 2nd, and you’ll find MotherReader’s selections for the letter A here. Look for posts on B and beyond each week.

Bookmaking possibilities abound for little kids learning their ABCs. And one of the many books I’ll be teaching to kindergartners this year features pop-up pages, 26 of them, capturing the kids’ efforts to write the alphabet and fill their pages with pictures associated with each letter sounds. Photos and instructions coming soon!

I send out the occasional e-newsletter, just to re-
mind people to check out all the new posts on the blog. What you’re seeing at the left is the back-to-school emailing that went out this week.

To receive the Bookmaking with Kids e-newsletter, you can join my email list by clicking here or on the Join Our Mailing List link at the bottom right of the blog’s home page. You can also send me an email directly.

I mentioned the word colophon in last week’s post about books to make at the start of the school year. I’m guessing that not a single student will know what it means. But I can promise that your kids will love it because of its blood-thirsty derivation.

A colophon is a description at the end of a book giving facts about its production. These can include the names of the people who designed it, the press where it was printed, the binding style, the papers and typefaces it uses, and sometimes more.

I encourage kids to include a colophon in books they make. It’s one more opportunity to write, and any chance to practice is to the good. But more important, it’s a place, much like an About the Author section, where their pride of accomplishment really shines through their words.

The word itself comes from the Greek kolophon, meaning summit. It derives from an ancient Ionian city of the same name. The story goes that the people who lived there, the Colophonians, were famous as good warriors. In fact, they were so good that they tipped the scale in favor of whichever side in a battle they fought, allowing it to finish. This skill gave rise to the phrase “Colophononem adidi”—I have put a finishing touch to it—and its use at the end of a book.

If this sounds too good to be true, please double-check my source for yourself: it’s Geoffrey Ashall Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book.

Okay, so I’m not above playing to kids’ fascination with a blood-curdling tale! Any why not, if it means more bookmaking, more writing, more artwork, more fun?