Bookmaking With Kids

Click here, then keep clicking the “Gimme More” button to see the resolutions this gizmo has to suggest. Let me know which one(s) you like by writing a Comment. Here are some of my favorites:

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!

This coming Sunday, December 20th, is my new favorite holiday: Do Nothing But Read Day.

Never heard of this particular celebration?

Well, that’s because it’s brand new, the brainstorm of a grad student in library studies who created a blog earlier this month to introduce and build support for DNBRD. The idea is to spend the day in pajamas, curled up somewhere comfy, reading for pleasure.

“I decided to start Do Nothing But Read Day because I haven’t gotten a chance to have a day of nonstop reading in a long time,” Amanda Lanyon-LeSage told the Wisconsin State Journal. “As a library student, someone who loves books and reading, that frustrated me.”

You can read her first post about DNBRD here.

What’s on my list for Do Nothing But Read Day? Well, I’m going to try to finish reading the books I’m supposed to wrap up and give as gifts! There’s Anatole by Eve Titus for a 6-year-old niece, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin for one daughter, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes for another daughter, and the list goes on.

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!

I love this die! It cuts nine 1¾-inch squares, each with a perforated side. In other words: an instant lift-the-flap page!

You’ll find it at RAFT in San Jose, where members can do die-cutting for free. If your school has an Ellison die-cut machine but not this die, you can get it here.

With a die-cut page, kindergartners and pre-
schoolers can make their own lift-the-flap activity book, illustrating varied categories with stickers, glued-on pictures or drawings. Here’s an example to get you started.