Bookmaking With Kids

Click here, then keep clicking the “Gimme More” button to see the resolutions this gizmo has to suggest. Let me know which one(s) you like by writing a Comment. Here are some of my favorites:

Pop-up Christmas trees (and dreidels, not pic-
tured) were the final project for my after-school bookmakers. It’s amazing how good-looking circles punched from collage scraps can be!

This coming Sunday, December 20th, is my new favorite holiday: Do Nothing But Read Day.

Never heard of this particular celebration?

Well, that’s because it’s brand new, the brainstorm of a grad student in library studies who created a blog earlier this month to introduce and build support for DNBRD. The idea is to spend the day in pajamas, curled up somewhere comfy, reading for pleasure.

“I decided to start Do Nothing But Read Day because I haven’t gotten a chance to have a day of nonstop reading in a long time,” Amanda Lanyon-LeSage told the Wisconsin State Journal. “As a library student, someone who loves books and reading, that frustrated me.”

You can read her first post about DNBRD here.

What’s on my list for Do Nothing But Read Day? Well, I’m going to try to finish reading the books I’m supposed to wrap up and give as gifts! There’s Anatole by Eve Titus for a 6-year-old niece, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin for one daughter, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes for another daughter, and the list goes on.

Cheerfully ignoring my suggestions for ways to start a story inside this drumstick book (see last week’s post), my “writingest” student decided to tell a story from the turkey’s point of view! So much more original than my story-starters, and, of course, rather more gruesome (as befits a 2nd grader).

Here are the first two pages of his book. I think it’s pretty understandable. But just in case: “traned” means “turned,” “hached” is “hatched” and “bucher” means “butcher.”

Another student, who’s turned her last three projects into joke books, busied herself making up turkey jokes. After I suggested she think about other meanings for the word “side”—mashed potatoes, beans, candied yams, and the like—she adapted an old standard:

Instead of popping this yummy-looking greeting card into the mail, I’ve decided to use it as the cover of a drumstick-shaped book. The challenge for my students: Conjure—and solve—the mystery of the missing bite.

The straight line you see on the left side of the drumstick becomes the book’s spine. You can download a drumstick template that fits on letter-sized paper by clicking here. Have kids fold the template in half (hamburger style) with the dashed line on the fold, then cut through both thicknesses on the solid line. Next, kids can tuck some folded paper inside, then staple or sew those pages through the spine. Kids can trim the pages to the shape of the drumstick (OK for older kids) or leave them as a rectangle extending beyond the drumstick (easier for little kids).

Consider a brainstorming session with kids about what art materials and techniques will produce the crunchiest, most realistic, most succulent looking drumstick!

And please let me know—in the Comments or by email—if your kids produce any fabulous culinary mysteries or come up with an artistic invention!

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A week before my after-school students started their Haunted House Books, we made a bunch ’o books from single sheets of paper—the basic version with no cutting, the “pants” cut, the center cut, the T cut. (You’ll find all these and more on this instruction sheet.) So when it came time to make the Haunted House, the kids instantly recognized it as a variation on the center-cut book. And because they could plunge ahead with little or no assistance from me, they had lots of time for the all-important business of making their houses scary. Here are some examples: