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.

Joan Sweeney’s book Me on the Map is standard fare in San Francisco classrooms and I usually propose a basic single-sheet booklet to teachers who want their kids to put some creative energy into their map unit. You can see some examples here and here.

But my friend Debra was hankering for something more. Could we somehow combine the basic book with the pop-up map project recently featured on Bookmaking With Kids, she asked? It took a little tinkering, but the answer was, Yes!

My new Me on the Map project features a stick-figure kid on the first spread, holding a map that pops out and folds up when the book is opened or closed. Debra’s 1st graders LOVED making the pop-ups, personalizing the figures and adding comments in speech balloons. Here’s a look at some of those first spreads. (And please, keep reading for downloads and directions.)

Each book is made from a preprinted tabloid sheet of paper (click here for the template), folded into a basic book (click here for directions), with a box pop-up (click here for instructions) cut into the structure’s first valley fold.

I spent an hour helping the kids fold the basic structure, number the pages, cut the pop-up and glue on a snippet of a map showing their school’s location. Over the next two weeks, during “station” time, they created the rest of the pages using outline maps that I supplied. I’ll show the subsequent pages of these books in later posts.

Click here to see all the posts in the Me on the Map series.

A box pop-up is one of the easiest for kids to make, and the variations are endless. Here are a few of the possibilities. My colleague Susie recently taught the ABC pop-up (top left) to kindergartners; click here for more info. My friend Debra uses the version at the right every year as a book-report project with her 1st graders. And the model at bottom left is one that I use when I teach map-reading.

The ever-inventive Susie recently made a huge improvement on my map-reading version. By adding pre-printed covers and sketching in some additional lines, she made it much easier for kids to tackle. Click each of the photos below for enlargements.

You can download a PDF template by clicking here. Now click the link for step-by-step instructions: (more…)

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!

A perennial favorite in the classroom, Judi and Ron Barrett’s book features an object that’s very easy to turn into a pop-up. Just two folds and one scalloped cut, and ta da, you’ve got an umbrella that opens and closes.

The directions are printed right on this PDF template. You’ll need 8½ x 11″ paper for printing the templates, construction paper or colored 8½ x 11″ paper for each child to use as a cover for the pop-up, plus colored pencils and the like.

What will your students have raining down in their own version of Chewandswallow? I’ve got a bunch* of hapless frogs tumbled earthward in my model. Click the picture for a more detailed view.

*Did you know that there’s a collective noun for a group of frogs? Actually, there are several: a knot, an army, or a colony of frogs!