Bookmaking With Kids

There’s been a certain levity to the last couple of bookmaking projects featured on Bookmaking with Kids. So now for something a little more serious. Except that it’s still fun. Bookmaking is always fun.

This is one of a series of projects that lets kids recreate book formats used in times past. In the process they learn a little something about the evolution of books over the centuries as well as the different cultures that developed them. Making historical book models is a wonderful lens for looking at the past.

A hornbook was what children of the 14th through 18th centuries used to learn their ABCs.

“When little children first
are brought to schoole
A Horne-booke is a necessarie toole.”
— Nicholas Breton, 1612

It wasn’t really a book at all: it consisted of a sheet of parchment or paper with the alphabet, phonics and a prayer printed or in manuscript, mounted on a small, wooden, paddle-shaped board and protected by a thin sheet of transparent animal horn that was attached with metal strips and nails.

The hornbook is an easy-to-make project that’s suitable whenever Colonial America pops up in your curriculum. I’ve taught it to 2nd graders, 3rd graders and 5th graders. The larger of the two replicas pictured to the right is good for younger students. It consists of a piece of stiff paper held inside a plastic sheet protector by brads and attached to a wooden paint stirrer! How easy is that?! The smaller one, more historically accurate in shape, is cut from cardboard. The written sheet is held in place with clear sticky-backed plastic. And four brads secure strips of gold-colored paper that mimic the metal used in real hornbooks.

Some curious facts about hornbooks:

• Hornbooks were made of many materials beside wood, including ivory, silver, leather, bone … and occasionally gingerbread. When students learned a letter, they were allowed to eat it!
• Children wore their hornbooks. There was a hole in the handle so they could be attached to boy’s belt or a girl’s girdle.
• Because they were fairly indestructible and went everywhere with their owners, hornbooks were often used as bats when children were at play.
• English and European hornbooks typically had a cross in the upper lefthand corner. But there were no crosses in New England hornbooks, because the Puritans abhorred the symbol of the cross.

Click the link for a diagram you can print as a template, links to useful web sites and other information.

This illustration shows all the elements that go into a hornbook. Click here for a PDF to download and print.

• Click The Humble Hornbook for a wonderful collection of illustrations and citations from numerous sources.
• The Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University has an informative web page about hornbooks and is the source of the diagram to the left.
• For another good overview, read First School Books by Rita Smith, in an online publication called Recess.
• You’ll find quotations about hornbooks (going as far back as the 14th century) on this Wikiquote page.

To be completely, exuberantly excessive on this topic—like me!—you could bake gingerbread hornbooks. I bought a wooden mold from this web site. The accompanying booklet is actually the best resource for kids that I’ve found on this subject! Checking back recently, I discovered that the craftsman who makes the mold now sells hornbook replicas, too. Interesting to look at but perhaps too pricey for a classroom purchase.

If you include baking in your hornbook activities, make sure to share this verse by Matthew Prior (1664–1721), in his poem Alma, describing gingerbread hornbooks sold at fairs:

To Master John the English maid
A Hornbook gives of Gingerbread:
And that the Child may learn the better,
As he can name, he eats the Letter:
Proceeding thus with vast Delight,
He spells, and gnaws, from left to right.

Finally, please let me know if you’re interested in more historical book projects by clicking here and I’ll put you in touch with my East Bay colleague Kathy, who has pioneered a curriculum that dovetails perfectly with elementary- and middle-school social studies.