Bookmaking With Kids

If you give a mouse a cookie, you’re sure to give a moose a muffin. Next you’ll give a pig a pancake. Then you’ll give a cat a cupcake. No doubt the mouse will go to school and the pig will have a party. In short, once you start reading Laura Numeroff’s books to kids, there’s absolutely no stopping.

Little kids have an instinct for acting out these stories with their toys, varying events and contriving mayhem of their very own. This fun often continues once kids are reading and writing. In fact, I’ve yet to meet a K–4 teacher who didn’t relish using the Numeroff books as writing prompts for students. Click the link to follow this particular adventure. (more…)

Another book I often share with teachers in my workshops is Antoinette Portis’s Not a Box, a magical book about imaginative play.* It features an inventive bunny, a box and an unseen, somewhat clueless adult who asks questions. When Why are you sitting in a box? appears on one page, the bunny appears on the next, sitting in the box-as-race-car and replying indignantly, It’s not a box!

To me, it’s a wonderful reminder of the creative byways kids will wander down, given a chance, some time and a springboard—whether it’s a cardboard box or fixings for a handmade book.

Imagine my pleasure, during a bout of domestic divestiture, on discovering Ten Dots Can Be, a book made by my older daughter. Same principle as Not a Box and its successor Not a Stick, but pretend-published years and years before Portis came on the scene. My thanks to the creative teacher who provided her students with the black dots and the opportunity to transform them.

*Another book I like by by this author is A Penguin Story.

Click the link to see more pages from the Dot book. (more…)

I always tell teachers in my work-
shops that not only will their students love making books by hand (often taking greater pains with their work and tremendous pride in the result) but also that the kids’ parents will adore the books, cherishing them far longer than typical school projects.

Is it legit to offer myself as proof?

I’ve recently been spending vast amounts of time divesting our home of stuff, tons of stuff, in anticipa-
tion of a move. Of course some things escape this draconian decluttering, including books my kids made as 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders. Here’s one that I’ve kept for 16 years (so far). I’ll show a few others in subsequent posts. And Happy Birthday to the daughter who made this; she’s 24 today!

FYI, I removed the rusting staples that held the book together, reusing the holes to create a Japanese stab binding. Click the link to see more of the book’s pages. (more…)

Everyone’s fingerprints are unique. And when kids ink up their fingers and add prints to the page of a book or to a picture, it makes their handmade work that much more endearing. The pictures below show the cover of a book written and illustrated by a 2nd grader followed by a just-for-fun pageful of fingerprint critters. Note the wonderful misspelling in the lower left corner.

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…)

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.