Bookmaking With Kids

I was poking around on the San Francisco Public Library web site, requesting books for myself, when I happened to wander over to the kids’ section. And wow, does it look good! The new look premiered a few months ago, and yet more goodies and resources are coming over the summer.

Colorful and uncluttered, the kids’ home page shows a fanciful San Francisco skyline with a cable car reading a book, the Twin Peaks’ tower, a sea lion sporting a head set, a pencil poised for homework, and a taxicab—all icons that link to key areas of the site. Hang around for a while and you’ll notice that the weather changes, and so does the light, depending on the time of day. The sound effects—a clanging cable car bell and a barking sea lion—are good, too.

I hope the pictures below will tempt you to explore the five main areas of the site. And if you’re not from San Francisco, don’t worry. Most of the site’s features are accessible to everyone—in English, Spanish and Chinese!

Among my favorite features:

• The Girls Worth Knowing book list on the Read page
• The Children’s Story Line and Speakaboo options on the Listen page, especially nice for pre-readers, emerging readers and kids learning English
• The SFS Kids area, where kids and parents can learn about the San Francisco Symphony, listen to instruments, make up a tune with The Composerizer, play excerpts on The Radio, and more (Make sure to click on Christopher Rouse’s Ku-Ka-Ilimoku, the last excerpt on Channel 1!)
• The various family features on the Grown Ups page, which deliver the best round-up I’ve seen of kid-friendly activities, places and events in San Francisco

Also on the Grown Ups page, My Little Rhyme Book, a download in English, Spanish and Chinese, has more than a dozen songs, rhymes and hand-
clapping chants. To turn the illustrated text into a little booklet, click this PDF, print it in landscape mode, double-sided, on 8-1/2 x 11 paper, and trim the height. Fold the pages as a group and secure them with a rubber-band binding and you’ll have a booklet that looks like the one you see at the left.

Kudos to the SFPL Web Services Team, their contracted web designer, and all the librarians who contributed to this fabulous resource!

I love this die! It cuts nine 1¾-inch squares, each with a perforated side. In other words: an instant lift-the-flap page!

You’ll find it at RAFT in San Jose, where members can do die-cutting for free. If your school has an Ellison die-cut machine but not this die, you can get it here.

With a die-cut page, kindergartners and pre-
schoolers can make their own lift-the-flap activity book, illustrating varied categories with stickers, glued-on pictures or drawings. Here’s an example to get you started.

Just before Thanks-
giving I was privileg-
ed to share some of my bookmaking pro-
jects in a workshop called Book Arts for the Young Child. And now, having recovered from holiday mayhem, I wanted to give everyone a peek at our activities and to post some templates that make it easy to replicate the projects.

The venue was the Children’s Center at the San Francisco Public Library. (Thank you Christy, for scheduling and publicizing the workshop and for supplying terrific give-aways!) The 40 participants were teachers, substitutes and day-care providers for children as young as 2! And the topic was the whys and hows of making books with very little kids.

Here’s the “why” in a nutshell:

Bookmaking and kids are a magical combination. When kids make books by hand, they’re forging a personal connection to reading, to writing, to making art. Bookmaking connects children in a tactile way to the pleasures of listening to stories and later, to the pleasures of reading, writing, illustrating their work and sharing it with others. And when we encourage really young kids to play with “ingredients” like paper and scissors, crayons and stickers, ribbons and hole punches, we honor their instinct for the scribble writing and the pretend reading that are the natural starting points for emerging literacy.

We started with the simplest book possible, just a folded piece of paper. But for a little kid and first-timer bookmaker, folding a piece of paper is no mean feat. And for a teacher, it’s surprisingly hard work to describe and demonstrate the many steps we take for granted in that basic activity. Our one-page folded books included a Frame Book, a book based on Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and a barn-shaped book made from a die-cut red file folder, pictured in the thumbnail images above.

We also made one-page folded books tucked into a plastic box as a cover; rubber-band books; necklace books; paper-plate books; books with two holes punched along the spine and held together with pipe cleaners, prong fasteners and the little plastic clips used to seal bags of bread! Click the images below to see some of these projects.


For printable PDFs, click the highlighted text below. And watch future posts for more pictures of the books we had most fun making!
Frame Book template
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom template
Rubber-band book instructions

A charming romp through the history of the English language, its pleasures and peculiarities, The Word Snoop is a must-have book for the home, classroom and library.

It’s written for kids ages 9 and up in the enticing voice of an explorer eager to share discoveries and enlist new snoops. But Ursula Dubosarsky’s book works well as a read-aloud, too. In the classroom or school library, for sure. But also at home, in the kitchen, perhaps, when preparations for supper are afoot. Give it a try in the living room, too, as a sourcebook for word play like anagrams, palindromes, pangrams, puns and more.

Ranging from the beginning of written language, around 4,000 BC, to the present-day lingo of text messages, The Word Snoop is a miracle of compression. Dubosarsky manages to summarize and simplify this long history without dumbing it down. And her wise choice of abundant fun facts keeps kids reading. Did you know, for example, that

• About 60% of words in English have silent letters in them? (She explains why!)
• The nickname for quotation marks in Hungarian is cat’s claws?
• Benjamin Franklin wanted to rid the American alphabet of C, J, Q, W X and Y and replace them with new letters to make spelling more sensible?
• Electrocute is actually a portmanteau word?

She regularly tosses off challenges, too: Write a sentence using only Anglo-Saxon words (from a handy list on Page 45). Write a story where each word begins with a different letter of the alphabet, in order. Crack the codes at the end of each chapter.

I especially love the inspired nuttiness in her choice of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch to explain euphemisms or Judy Garland’s Trolley Song as an example of onomatopoeia. She also points kids to Victor Borge for a humorous take on punctuation, Danny Kaye for tongue twisters, and Lead Belly for his Pig Latin Song along with more conventional resources.

Illustrator Tohby Riddle’s drawings are the perfect complement to Dubosarsky’s playful approach.

Dubosarsky continues the fun in her blog, answering questions from kids. Click to see a recent post, a lovely excerpt from an interview, and resources parents and teachers can download. (more…)

Just as school was winding down in June, my colleague Susie had the opportunity to teach bookmaking to grade-level lead teachers from the Redwood City elementary schools. More than 30 teachers participated in sessions designed for kindergarten, grades 1 & 2, 3rd grade, and grades 4–6. But in the interests of letting participants enjoy their summer vacations to the fullest, we didn’t do any workshop follow-up! Until now. The first day of the new school year seemed like a fitting time to post instruction sheets and templates so participants can start making books with their new students.

Susie chose book projects that were similar in design for all four sessions but with added challenges for students as they moved up through the grades. The books included different kinds of journals, pop-ups, accordion books and many variations of books made from a single sheet of paper. The photos show a collaborative kindergarten book of ABC pop-ups (C is for cake, D for dog, E for elephant and F for fish) and, at left, some of the participants at work (or is it play?).

For a list of PDFs you can download, please click the link. And if you have questions, please feel free to email Susie. (more…)

Most bookmaking basics are in your classroom already: paper, scissors, pencils, markers, cray-
ons, hole punches, staplers. But with some added supplies, kids can tackle projects with extra pizazz or complexity. This round-up lists tools and materials used during our Summer Camp work-
shops, with links to suppliers with low prices.

Bone folders
Kids could use tongue depressors to make crisp folds but giving them a special tool can encourage a special attentiveness. Consider Provo Craft’s 8-inch plastic bone folders, on sale right now at MisterArt.com for $1.93 apiece.

Sewing Needles
The eyes in John James Darners #18 needles are wide enough to children to thread themselves. You’ll find them at Talas, at $4.35 for a package of 25.

Awls
You need awls with strong handles to withstand taps from a hammer. We use the #1 Awls from Talas at $2.81 each, probably less with a price break for a large order. Click to read more of our resource list. (more…)