Bookmaking With Kids

I’ve recently been exchanging email with a New York City teacher who wanted an easy and appealing book that her 1st graders could make for comparing and contrasting their lives with those of children in the Colonial era. More specifically, Sheila wanted her kids to look at similarities and differences in schooling, food, clothes, homes, work, and fun and games.

Looking around the Bookmaking With Kids site, she found a post about the hornbooks Colonial children used when learning to read. And she found the Yakety Yak book, which accommodates two separate viewpoints and is described here and here.

I think the Yakety Yak book is a fine choice if students are pretending to talk to or correspond with a Colonial child. But it doesn’t quite fit the bill for an expository writing project. In looking through my bag of tricks, I found three easy structures that were a better fit for Sheila’s project: the file-folder book, the dos-a-dos book and the staggered page book. In the next three posts, I’ll describe each book and its advantages and present plenty of pictures.

Then you, too, can decide which one you’d use for a “Then Vs. Now” project, and why.