Bookmaking With Kids

This post isn’t about making a book, it’s about reading a book. In fact, it’s about reading a book out loud—right now—before the movie comes out later this year!

The Tale of Despereaux

This February, the San Francisco Center for the Book is fortunate to host English book artist and children’s literacy expert Paul Johnson. He’ll be teaching seven (!) work-
shops—four for teachers and three for fans of paper engineering—as well as a making free, evening presentation at the SFCB.

This visit is Paul’s fourth time at the Center. I remember being mesmerized by his gifted teaching the first time he was here, so I rummaged around in my old email and found my reaction from July 2002:

Johnson’s specialty is doing exceptional things with single sheets of paper, and he uses his magic in two ways, teaching book arts to school children (and training teachers to use bookmaking in their classrooms) and making many-layered pop-up paper constructions. His show-and-tell session was electrifying, the most inspiring talk I’ve heard. The audience applauded and applauded—they just couldn’t stop. There was a lot of hugging, too, as if people hoped to catch some spark of his.

Paul himself is modest, low-key, soft-spoken, undemonstrative. Except that as he talked, something extraordinary began to happen: a quiet passion seemed to take possession of him and spill over into the audience, too. I was completely carried away by the story of how he discovered paper—he said he didn’t notice it until he was 45, and then he couldn’t help but change his life—his endless fascination with the possibilities in a single sheet of paper (“I didn’t add anything, I didn’t take anything away, but look what it turned into! I think this must be Zen.”), his work habits, his love affair with color, his belief in book arts as a compelling path to literacy for children.

You can hear Paul at a free presentation Monday February 4th at the BUG meeting (Book Arts Users Group) at the SFCB from 7 to 9 p.m. Click here for directions to the Center.

Follow this link to learn about Paul’s SFCB workshops for teachers. His other SFCB classes include Secret Gardens in Boxes, Books You Can Hang Like Pictures and A Box of Fireworks. Finally, here are some photos to feast your eyes on. Click each one to see an enlargement.

At Washington Elementary School in Berkeley, Sacha Moustakas’ 2nd graders are making books once a month. And these photos show a few of the varied structures the kids have tackled.

Their projects have included collaged portfolios, pictured at left and below, with space inside for All About Me profiles (plus notes, drafts and revisions) as well as kids’ research into their families. For the Day of the Dead, students made Ancestor Books. And to dovetail with the class’ study of rain forests in December, book artist and instructor cj grossman taught students to make a 4-panel accordion book that held pages for text in one valley fold and a pop-up character in the other valley fold.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Family Bookmaking Day will be featuring that same structure on Sunday, January 13th.

Click on each picture below to see an enlargement.

When Nueva School celebrated Children’s Book Week this past November with a series of eight bookmaking workshops (among many other activities), the 2nd graders in Alison Fox-Mazzola’s class were just starting their study of California Missions. So it was the perfect time to make Mission Books.

My New Year’s greeting from Alison was an emailful of photos, and the finished books look just great. Congratulations to the whole class!


Like a great many of the books I teach kids to make, these Mission Books are each made from a single sheet of paper. (I keep saying the possibilities are endless, and I mean it!) I copied a faint drawing of Mission Dolores onto the paper to make it easier for the children to cut out the roofline and fill in architectural details. Then, with four folds and one cut in the middle of the sheet, kids created a three-dimensional space that they turned into the front and back of Mission Dolores.

Here’s a sample of some of the text:

A mission is where the Ohlone and the Spanish lived. A mission is also a church. A mission is where they had their farm.

Some of the Ohlone died of disease and about 5,500 people died and only 100 remained and Mexico and Spain had a war. …

To download an 11×17 PDF template for a Mission Dolores Book, click here. Please click the link to see more photos of books made by Alison’s students: more…

The first Family Bookmaking Day of the new year is Sunday, January 13th, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Please help spread the word about this free event to parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles—anyone and everyone with a child age 12 or younger. Teachers and librarians are always welcome, too.

Sunday’s event features five bookmaking activities, including one especially for grown-ups to make for kids:

Scavenger Hunt Books. Create personalized clues and tuck them into pages made from zip-lock baggies. Easy, fast and reusable. Great for car trips, rain-day fun, nature hikes, parties and more.

Word Pictures. Explore a fun and funky way to jazz up your handmade books by playing with the building blocks of every page—letters and words.

Rubber Band Books. This simple binding produces surprisingly glamorous results that kids can use for collections of recipes, jokes, leaves, stamps; travel journals, and more.

Pop-Up Storybooks. This 4-panel accordion houses the pages for a story in one valley fold and a pop-up character in the other valley fold.

Accordion Collages. Similar in structure to the Pop-Up Storybook, this accordion features decorative hard covers and makes a beautiful display for small collages.

Click here to download a PDF flyer to circulate.