Bookmaking With Kids

I think little kids—preschoolers, kindergartners, 1st graders—should work with scissors as often as possible … cutting defined shapes … cutting free-form … cutting and gluing collage materials. Yes, there’ll be a mess. But the work-out for fine-motor skills is invaluable.

Step III of the Scenic Concertina project in Debra’s 1st grade classroom involved a LOT of cutting. I gave each student a sheet filled with color-xeroxed macaws. They had to choose any three, cut them out and glue one to each pleat in their books.

Sounds easy enough. But there’s some strategy to it. Kids soon discovered (sometimes with a hint from Debra) that it was more manageable to break the

task into stages: cutting their chosen birds out of the paper roughly at first, setting aside the paper and then cutting more carefully around each bird.

Step IV was to attach text pages to the booklets, using a long-reach stapler (a tool that fascinates the kids, for some reason).

This post shows the macaws “migrating” from xeroxed pages to the books. Please watch the kids’ progress in subsequent posts.