Bookmaking With Kids

A week before my after-school students started their Haunted House Books, we made a bunch ’o books from single sheets of paper—the basic version with no cutting, the “pants” cut, the center cut, the T cut. (You’ll find all these and more on this instruction sheet.) So when it came time to make the Haunted House, the kids instantly recognized it as a variation on the center-cut book. And because they could plunge ahead with little or no assistance from me, they had lots of time for the all-important business of making their houses scary. Here are some examples: