Bookmaking With Kids

Year after year, the 1st graders in my friend Debra’s classroom do awesome work. Including lots of handmade books, I’m happy to say. Recently Debra turned photos of her kids’ writing projects into a video. You can watch it here. Kudos to Debra and to the kids she calls “the best 1st graders in the universe.”

I found this dreamy tropical-island stationery in my paper stash and decided to turn it into a book.

Click the link to see the transformation from 2D to 3D. (more…)

I recently turned up a 2nd-grade homework log for my younger daughter (now 20!) and was charmed to see what she was reading solo, what her father and I were reading aloud to her and how her grandparents helped out, too.

During the particular week shown above (just in case you can’t read the handwriting), our chosen reading included The Math Curse, several Fractured Fairy Tales and six poems by Jack Prelutsky. But the best idea was my mother’s: taking turns reading the Chance and Community Chest cards from a Monopoly set that featured the city of London!

My parents lived there on several occasions, and I did, too, as a kid, so stories about London always abounded in our family. Reading the Monopoly cards was not only practice in reading for my daughter but no doubt also a prelude to hearing about family adventures in a great city.

What strikes me now about this entry in the homework log is my mom’s creative approach to reading practice. It was a brilliant idea! Thank you!

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!

When the ordinary world between the covers of a book slowly turns curiouser and curiouser … when words on the page turn into characters you can see and hear … when you stay up long, long past bedtime to find out what happens, that’s a good read. And that’s the Carbonel series.

Technically more than 50 years old but in truth timeless, Barbara Sleigh’s three Carbonel stories have been beautifully reprinted by the New York Review’s Children’s Collection.

Kids 9 and up can read the books solo. (I think there’s equal appeal for boys and girls, by the way.) But you could and should read them aloud—to littler children, older kids and any grown-ups who stray within earshot.

The first of the books, Carbonel: The King of Cats, starts with a good deed gone awry.

Rosemary Brown, age 10, sets out to supplement her mother’s meager earnings by buying a broom and hiring herself out to clean houses during summer vacation. She ends up in tears, with a dilapidated broom and a cat that cost her her last three farthings.

But just at that moment, quite clearly and distinctly, the cat said:

“It’s a better bargain than it looks, you know.”

“Who said that?” Rosemary could not believe her ears.

“Me, of course!” said the cat. “Oh, yes, of course I can talk. All animals can, but you can only hear me because you are holding the witch’s broom.”

Carbonel, she soon learns, is a royal cat who was stolen as a kitten and enslaved by a witch. Rosemary’s three farthings freed him from the witch, but not from a Silent Magic spell that dooms him to more servitude. Rosemary immediately vows to help him. And so begins a quest for the witch’s hat, her cauldron and a book of spells needed to undo the curse.

It’s a tricky business tracking down clue after clue after clue while keeping grown-ups clueless. But Rosemary and her friend John go about their sleuthing undetected, with an appealing blend of resourcefulness and humor, courage and kindheartedness. Oh, and poetic ingenuity, too, because the broomstick won’t budge unless bidden in verse!

Here’s the transformation—so far—of the postcard pictured in last Thursday’s post:

1 The postcard’s now a book cover.

2 It’s got a new title, cut out with fancy-edged scissors.

3 In place of the info originally above the raccoon’s head there’s a cut-out thought balloon.

4 And behind the thought balloon are pictures of a place the raccoon would like to visit (snow-capped mountains) and something he’d like to eat (strawberries).