Bookmaking With Kids

In honor of Lewis Carroll’s 180th birthday tomorrow, I’ve created a single-sheet booklet featuring a stellar word game that he invented called Doublets. It’s fun, it’s fiendish, it’s addictive.

Doublets involves transforming a given word into another by changing one letter at a time, making a real word at each link in the chain. The illustration to the left, by Gregory Nemec, offers a witty example, showing how an APE evolves into MAN, with four links in the chain:
ape–apt–opt–oat–mat–man.

Hundreds of other such transformations are possible, and the booklet pictured below features six: MORE-LESS, COLD-WARM, HEAD-TAIL, PIG-STY, HAND-FOOT, and WET-DRY. To make the booklet, print this PDF double-sided on letter paper and fold into a basic accordion following the directions for Book #1 in this instruction sheet. (Try not to peek at the answers—printed in tiny, tiny type—on the concealed part of the booklet.)

A Google search will yield lots of sites with other doublets for kids (and adults) to solve. At this link you can read both Carroll’s article in the March 1879 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, in which he introduced the game, as well as the text of the book, Doublets: A Word-Puzzle, that he published later that year. Martin Gardner’s article, Word Ladders: Lewis Carroll’s Doublets, is a good overview. It appeared in the November 1994 issue of Math Horizons and is the source of the illustration reproduced above and in the single-sheet booklet.

Gregory Nemec’s illustration is reproduced here with the permission of the artist.

Congratulations to Amy, the winner of the Chinese New Year dragon book give-away.

Writing from Riverside, CA, Amy says she loves “making books with kids! I teach my own kids bookmaking (I homeschool some of them) and volunteered to teach a book to my daughter’s 4th grade class this year as well. Her teacher was very excited about the prospect and I will be going in this Spring to teach. If I won the giveaway, I could teach them two classes!”

Good luck with the project, Amy. And please email pix to share once the kids have made their books.

I posted about making popcorn boxes/books just this Monday, and a day later a reader had already snagged my photo of the project and added it to her pinboard over on Pinterest. (With credit to Bookmaking With Kids, thank you very much.)

In fact, I see Pinterest a lot these days when I check on the traffic this blog gets. The picture above shows just of few of the more than 200 (!) Bookmaking With Kids projects currently up on various pinboards. I’m really glad that web visitors have a new way of finding out about making books with kids and about my blog.

Does everybody know what I’m talking about? Do you know the words pins and pinboards and Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social network of virtual pinboards (think bulletin boards with pizzazz) where people pin (post) images they find on the web to pinboards of their own, organize them by topic, and follow pinboards of other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. There are pinboards devoted to healthy eating, dogs, biking, books, remodeling, quilts … you name it. Search the grade you teach, for instance, or art projects, a favorite children’s author, topics coming up in your curriculum, any topic connected with kids, and you’ll instantly have hundreds of pins to browse.

You can also click your way back to the place an image originated, especially helpful when you’re looking for projects with templates and instructions.

But keep an eye on the time—once you start browsing Pinterest hours can pass before you finish!

Thursday January 19th is National Popcorn Day. This goofy “holiday” can lend itself to all manner of explorations—social studies, science, math, reading. And to help your class celebrate, here’s a festive project. It’s a fold-up popcorn box that I’m willing to call a book … provided kids write something on one or more of its panels.

The template is designed for 11×17 paper, because that produces a (small) movie-size box and provides a decent footprint for writing. I’ve hand-written a fun fact on my box: The oldest ears of popcorn, dating back 5,600 years, were found in the Bat Cave of New Mexico. Text-weight paper works fine, though a heavier weight would make the box a bit sturdier. The instructions are printed right on the template.

Popcorn facts, science experiments and math activities abound on the web. And for 1st and 2nd graders, don’t forget to share Tomie de Paola’s The Popcorn Book.

Enjoy!

Bookmaking With Kids is celebrating Chinese New Year, which begins January 23rd, with a giveaway: Supplies for making the dragon books pictured above.

Just email me, saying why you value making books with your students … or why you’d like to try bookmaking. I’ll choose one teacher or librarian at random and send out enough googly eyes and red paper—printed with the face of a dragon and partially folded to make the project really easy—for one class. (You’ll need to supply collage material and mark-making supplies for use as dragon’s feet, scales and the like.)

You can also make this single-sheet book on your own by printing this PDF template on red 11×17 paper and following these folding instructions:

1. Fold the paper in half lengthwise into a “hot dog.”
2. Accordion-fold the “hot dog” into four panels.
3. Slightly open the top panel and align the fold with the spine of the adjacent panel, pressing to form an equilateral triangle.
4. Stand the dragon up with the flattened triangle (face) perpendicular to the accordion-fold body.

There’s some “sleight of hand” in Steps 3 & 4, but I think this drawing should help.

Checking back through posts from years past, I found two other projects to consider for Chinese New Year:

Click here for more about the dragon book, left, and here for the chopstick book post.

I’m still in a flexagon mood, so here’s that wonderful structure again, interpreted this time as a calendar for 2012.

Consider recycling dis-
carded wrapping paper and cards from the holi-
days into collages for each month’s illustration. My model uses bits and pieces left from a 2011 Green Chair Press calendar that I cut down into gift tags.

Here’s a printed template (text only) to download. Print it double-sided, preferably on 24 lb. or 28 lb. letter-sized paper. (Slightly heavier paper will prevent bleed-through.) For assembly instructions, as well as a guide to operating the flexagon, click here.