Bookmaking With Kids

When librarian Lisa Bishop decided to challenge everyone in the Flynn Elementary School community to write a story, the format she choose was a little eight-page booklet folded from a single sheet of paper. And for the covers—can you guess?—she’s using library card pockets.

Here’s a look at the raw ingredients of The Flynn 500:
That’s the title page of the booklet, on the left; the book inside a library card pocket, below; and at right, a spread in an open book.

The completed Flynn 500 books will be displayed during the school’s Author’s Night, March 19th, the culmination of a series of Read-a-Thon events that begins March 3rd with the celebration of Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Check back here to see the magic kids worked with their blank pages.

My latest love is the lowly library card pocket.

Let’s ignore the possibility that it’ll go the way of the oak-and-brass-rod card catalog. For now, a handful of library card pockets is a real bonanza for bookmakers.

Library card pockets happen to be the perfect size to hold booklets folded from an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper. And those little booklets happen to be the perfect size for all sorts of kids’ writing.

• A collection of little poems
• A short (very short) story
• An all-about-me book
• A menagerie of fingerprint critters
• A vacation diary

I’d welcome your additions to this list; please post a comment!

In Debra’s 1st grade classroom at Lawton Elementary School, the little booklets and the library card pockets became a collection of book reviews, all linked together. Tucked behind the booklets are little cut-out figures the kids made to look like the main characters.
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Yes, that is a blender you’re seeing. No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: the blender is attached to a stationary bicycle. And yes, the banana-berry smoothies created by the long line of kids eager to pedal the Blender Bike were really yummy.

This delightful contraption was the star attraction of this past week’s Food & Fun for the Whole Family, an evening of book-arts projects with a fitness and nutrition twist. The idea was for youngsters from Roy Cloud, Clifford and Adelante schools in Redwood City to learn about healthy foods by making a variety of books, from Refrigerator Books that opened to reveal empty shelves for kids to fill with foods to Food Pyramids to Chopstick Books and more.

When kids completed six projects, it was dessert time.

The Blender Bike came to the event courtesy of Bryden Johnston at Collective Roots and was made by the Juice Peddler in Oakland. For information on the next Food & Fun for the Whole Family, please click the link. more…

Celebrate Chinese New Year (February 7th) with dragons crafted from folded paper. Kids made the mythical beasts shown here by folding paper squares (just three folds!) into a form called Lotus Books and gluing them together.

If these dragons look somewhat familiar to you, it’s because they use the same building block as the ornament pictured in the Paper Star entry on December 18th. But the units are put together a bit differently in the two structures. In the ornament, the units are glued together in the same orientation, both units facing up. In the dragon, as you can see in the sketch on the left, one unit faces up, the other unit faces down; the more units you add, the longer the structure.

You can download instructions for making the Lotus Book by clicking here. Once kids master the basic folded unit, it’s easy to get creative. Consider supplying lots of extra colored paper for dragon details like legs, fangs, claws, forked tongues, a burst of flame. For color and variety, tuck squares or triangles cut from contrasting or decorative paper into the Lotus units, as in the dragons above. Or, build a dragon from lots of squares that start out large and get smaller and smaller. The result is a creature with a large head, a long, long body and a small tail.

Kudos to book artist and instructor Susie Peyton for teaching this activity amid the chaos of a Family Literacy Night and for helping kids achieve such beautiful results!

To read about projects that have worked well at other family literacy nights, click here.

For more dragon pictures, click the link: more…

Many of the book forms I teach to children use nothing but a single sheet of paper.

To be brutally depressing about it, plain old paper is just about all many classroom teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District can afford.

On the other hand, plain old paper is the stuff of miracles. A few folds, a cut or two and kids have an eight-page booklet to call their own. Or a fairytale castle. Or a witch’s house. Or a storybook theater. Or a 3D landscape. The possibilities are endless.

The single sheet of paper can be as challenging and fruitful a medium for adults as it is for children. The work of British paper engineer and book artist Paul Johnson is a case in point. And I’ve just discovered the work of Danish artist Peter Callesen.

His recent works focus on white A4 paper, the most commonly used paper size in Europe, akin to our 8-1/2 x 11 letter paper. Plain old paper … stunningly varied, beautiful, thought-provoking results. Some of his pieces also take their inspiration from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and they’re sure to spark discussion if you show them to your students. Here’s an excerpt from Callesen’s comments on his work:

My paper works have lately been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality. I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost a magic process—or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping.

Thanks to Julie for bringing Callesen’s work to my notice!

Click the link to see more of Callesen’s paper-cut artwork, then click each image to see an enlargement. more…