Bookmaking With Kids

Whether your family is actually making a trip this summer, en-
joying a “staycation” or being armchair travelers, every kid
needs a passport!

My kids started making passports long before they needed the real thing, sparked by three examples.

The first was their father’s passport, its pages bursting with fascinating stamps accumulated on business trips.

The next was the Kids’ Passport they discovered when we first began visiting national parks. They desperately coveted those colorful stamps that conferred “You Were Here” status … and quietly despaired of ever getting enough stamps to give their passports that stuffed, well-traveled look. When they were a bit older, they were also inspired by the fabulous Top Secret Adventure kits from Highlights for Children.

So they began making their own—little booklets that were part passport, part photo album, part travel journal, part sketch book. Sometimes they were for real adventures, other times for imaginary journeys. Occasionally they were for invented personas, too!

Nothing could be easier: Kids just fold a couple of pages as a group and staple through the fold. Supply scissors, glue and collage materials like maps (free at AAA) and travel brochures (free at hotels, tourist spots and car-rental offices) and they’ll be good to go.

The passport pictured here is made from 5 x 8-inch index cards, folded in half. In it, my older daughter, then 12, was pretending to be a cat! She changed her name. She chose a destination reachable only by time-machine (Mesopotamia!). My favorite part is the reason she gave for “Purpose of Visit.” Click the image for an enlargement, and you’ll see her answer on the last line.

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

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…)

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…)

I happened to be on hand last Thursday when my 6-year-old niece was doing her homework, a mapping worksheet titled Where Are You?. And although she was eager to finish and go play with her grand-
mother’s cat, she suc-
cumbed to the imagina-
tive pleasures that maps so often inspire and de-
toured into a mapmaking adventure of her own.

Just as she was finishing, I asked where she would go if she were to make up her own map. Replying “Oh that’s easy,” she turned over the worksheet and began drawing a grid of her own. Like the worksheet grid, hers included a pet shop, a zoo, a park and her home, but personalized. “My chimney looks like this,” she explained. Her grid also provided scope for wishful thinking: a water-slide park (in the upper righthand corner) and an ice-cream parlor (lower righthand corner).

Most important, the map quest she concocted for herself reflected the heartfelt campaign she is waging with my brother and sister-in-law: Get a cat. So Step #1 takes the shortest route to the pet store:

Start at home. Go 3 blocks N. Buy 2 cats.

In Step #2, she treats her new pets to an outing:

Go 3 blocks E. Go 1 block S and 2 blocks W.

This puts the trio at the zoo, for Step #3:

Look at the tigers.

It was her intention, I think, to conclude with one more set of directions and so treat the cats to ice cream cones. But her grandmother’s cat, a real cat, made an appearance at that point, and off my niece went.

The moral of the story: Give kids a personal stake and they’ll take a mile.

NOTE: I was interested to see a 6-year-old using abbreviations, N for north, etc. Do kids have an instinct for shorthand? Do they naturally transfer the use of abbreviations from one context (such as writing the date as 4-29-2010) to another?

Click the link to see the original homework assignment. (more…)

Recognize these images?

They’re 1st graders’ visions of the Milky Way, the final drawing in their Me on the Map books and a resounding stamp of originality in a project that introduced them to maps. This post, the last in a series, shows what Debra’s students did with preprinted maps in handmade books that were otherwise lush with original artwork. I see more than cutting, pasting and wild coloring in the pages below. I see kids spending time with new images and the new information they convey and, with a fistful of crayons, taking the first steps to making it familiar.

Kudos to Debra and her 2009-2010 class at Lawton Alternative!

Click each picture to see an enlargement. And click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.

Stick-figure self-portraits by Debra’s 1st graders occupied the biggest part of their Me on the Map books because kids believe they are, after all, the cen-
ter of their own universe! After that first spread, the kids combined original artwork and cut-out maps. There’s one page apiece for their home, their city and their state. A map of the United States and another of the North American continent share Page 6. And a world map occupies the last page, along the kids’ drawings of the Milky Way.

Today’s post showcases the books’ second spread, with drawings of their homes—some showing the city’s legendary hills!—and a map of San Francisco. Click each photo for an enlargement. Click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.