Bookmaking With Kids

If you’re visiting the nation’s capital this summer (or indeed any time before October 2011), check out a wonderful little exhibition called Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn. It presents more than 50 pop-up and movable books published from 1476 to 2008.

The exhibition has a lively and informative blog where you’ll find details and photos of some of the books in the show, a video featuring paper engineer Matthew Reinhart, insights into the uses of movable parts in books over time and much more.

Curated by librarian Stephen Van Dyk of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Library in New York, the exhibition was assembled by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and is located in the National Museum of American History.

My must-have bookmaking find so far this summer is a rubber stamp from Hero Arts. It strikes me as perfect in lots of ways:

• It’s small, about 5 inches long and just over 2 inches high, so it’s not daunting for emerging writers.
• It lends itself to lots of different book formats, two of them shown below.
• It’s open-ended, part calendar and part log book.
• And its three key words conjure, for me, the kind of summers I wish for kids: adventures, exploration and discovery.

This stamp lends it-
self to a spectacularly easy loose-leaf for-
mat: the key-ring book. Kids just stamp and cut, stamp and cut, then punch a hole through their cut-outs and slip them onto a key ring. With luck, kids will enjoy these little books so much they’ll write on the back of each page, too.

For a pamphlet-style book, cut some pages the same height as the stamp and twice as wide. Fold them in half as a group and staple through the fold. Kids can design their own covers, stamp every page inside, or alternate pages so they’ll have more room to write.

For kids with lots to say, try making a taller book with more pages. That way, a stamp at the top of a page could serve as a chapter heading!

BTW, any rubber stamp that takes your child’s fancy is likely to be a great starting-point for a book; it doesn’t have to be this one. I’ve used chocolate-chip cookies stamps to encourage kindergartners and 1st graders to retell or make up variations on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I’ve used a castle stamp to inspire adventure stories.

This post is part of an occasional series, Summer Book Projects. Please watch for more ideas in the weeks ahead.

Using the ever-adaptable rubber-band binding, the 1st graders I’ve been working with this year made phone books for their final book-arts project. Lots of the kids added drawings to their covers. I particularly liked the one pictured at the top left (click for an enlargement) because it had the most detail: a cell phone in a charger, on a desk, with a task light!

Now take a look at the picture at the bottom right: Even at the end of 1st grade, friends is still a tricky word to spell!

To see pictorial instructions for making this book structure, click this earlier post.

The last stage of the long-running macaw project in Debra’s 1st grade classroom was the Really Important Part: reading and writing.

The students consulted lots of books, listened to Debra read aloud and watched a movie. Then they contributed to a giant list of newly acquired facts (below, left) and wrote drafts (like the one below, right), making sure to answer all the questions Debra had posed.

And finally they rewrote their corrected essays in folded booklets stapled into their Scenic Concertinas. Here’s one in its entirety:

The macaw’s habitat is the rain forest and the dry forest. Macaws eat clay, fruit and nuts. Macaws fly up to 35 miles per hour. They are endangered because people are smuggling them. This means they take them and sell them for money. Also they lose their home when the forest is cut down. Some humans are helping them by paying smugglers not to steal. Also, people take trips to see nature. This is eco-tourism. The macaws can use their toes to grip tree limbs and hang upside down. Some snakes and big cats can eat macaws.

For an up-close view, click each photo. And keep an eye out for some impressive vocabulary, including the bird’s Latin name, Ara Macao; ornithologist, deforestation, and even eco-tourism!

Read earlier, related posts here, here and here. And please click the link to see more pictures. (more…)

As the school year’s final book-arts project in my friend Debra’s classroom, we’re making phone books for the kids to fill in and use to stay in touch with classmates over the summer. They’re also roomy enough for kids to collect autographs or even glue in photos.

If you’d like to make these with your class, send me an email by May 27th. I’ll choose a winner at random and mail the supplies you’ll need.

The structure is a Staggered-Page Book, a name that tells you the crucial thing (Step 2, below) you need to know about making it.

1. Take five sheets of colored paper, each a different color. Jog them into a neat, horizontal stack (landscape orientation) and lay them on the desk.
2. Move the top four sheets to the left, exposing about a half-inch to three-quarters of an inch of the bottom sheet. Repeat until each sheet is offset from the one below it by about a half-inch to three-quarters of an inch.



3. Paper-clip the sheets in their staggered position.
4. Fold the pages in half as a group. Add a folded cover. (The one pictured here is 8.5 x 11 inches.)



5. Secure the cover and pages with your choice of binding. Consider sewing a pamphlet stitch, using a long-reach stapler or, as shown here, nipping partially circles with a two-hole punch and then doing a rubber band binding.

The Staggered-Page Book has many, many uses other than phone books. I hope this final photo will spark some ideas.

Right in time for Endangered Species Day yesterday at Lawton Alternative School, Debra’s 1st graders finished up a two-month project on macaws and put their colorful, fact-filled Scenic Concertina books on dis-
play. The kids even looked like macaws (!) for the day’s festivities … costumed in painted grocery bags they adapted as vests. Here are a few covers, completed books and vests. More details in the next few posts.

You can read about the earlier stages of this project here and here.

And please click the link for some great pix from Endangered Species Day. (more…)