Bookmaking With Kids

This bike rack, in front of my branch library, makes me happy … though I couldn’t possibly have carted my current stack of library books home on my bike.

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.

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!

Here’s a great way to encourage emerging writers: Affix library circulation slips to their handmade books and invite other students, family and friends to check them out.

I spotted this approach—part of a whole “library” showcasing 1st grade books—while I was teaching envelope accordion books last month. Kudos to teachers Pri, Jennifer and Elizabeth for going to extra lengths to make your kids feel like published authors!

Looks like I’ve devoted almost all my posts for the month of March to the Flynn 500! And why not?

I got overexcited by the kids’ creative achievements at this three-week Readathon and bookmaking event, and I think that showcasing their books is a great way to encourage other librarians and teachers to try bookmaking. Tell me you can resist faces like these?

And now for a peek at the writing. Below is a 3rd grader’s guide to caring for a pet snake, written in an accordion book with a plastic box for a cover. Click the link after the snake book to read “A Potato Chip’s Life.” Kudos to everyone at Flynn for an inventive, irresistible adventure in literacy.

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Among the oddments that Lisa, the librarian at Flynn Elementary, offered kids as book-
making materials during the Flynn 500 earlier this month were lots and lots of long disused flashcards. They were a decent size, maybe 5 x 7 inches; each featured a goofy but recognizable picture but no words.

Lisa’s idea was to let kids choose two cards as their front and back covers, and in between, concoct a story that made use of both pictures. It proved an inspired plan, and scores of kids put the cards to use as story starters.

The book in the spotlight here (a simple, two-hole punch binding held together with a pipe cleaner) has a raccoon on the front and a violin on the back, and the story connecting the two images is a wonderful little parable about sticking with what you love.

Click here to see a round-up of this year’s Flynn 500 posts.