Bookmaking With Kids

There’s something slightly subversive about many of the English children’s books that I love best. Think Alice in Wonderland, anything and everything by Roald Dahl, The Reluctant Dragon and The Borrowers, to name just a few. Their contrarian quality—good-bye to the rules, the expected, the ordinary—can show up even in picture books. And I was delighted to discover it in Once Upon An Ordinary School Day.

The story opens with the usual routines, reported in dead-pan prose:

Once upon an ordinary school day, an ordinary boy woke from his ordinary dreams, got out of his ordinary bed, had an ordinary pee and an ordinary bath, put on his ordinary clothes, and ate his ordinary breakfast.

The ordinary boy brushed his ordinary teeth, kissed his ordinary mom goodbye, and set off for his ordinary school.

But the story proceeds to twit convention when something quite out of the ordinary happens. The students see it before the readers do. And the look on their faces says, among other things: Turn the page!

Click the link to keep reading. more…

If you’ve got a Family Literacy Night com-
ing up, I recommend a table—or two or three—devoted to making House Books. This 3D structure was a hit with kids two weeks ago at Sherman Elementary School, presenting a blank “canvas” that kids filled with wonder-
fully varied stories.

I noticed a charming bit of artistry com-
mon to a quite a few books: writing alter-
nate lines of text in different colors. This technique made for great-looking books. But why was almost everybody doing it?

Were the bookmakers friends? Was there a book they were unconsciously imitating? Or was there just something in the air?

Kudos to librarian Clare Watsky and all the parents, staff and kids who made the event so much fun.

Instead of encouraging kids to spend time poring over the pictorial side of a state map, this lift-the-flap book directs their attention to the index on the flip side.

The index? How boring is that? Not boring at all in my opinion. Especially if the book’s text poses a (somewhat silly) challenge to kids, as this one does.

The answers form a wonderfully goofy litany. Cities that are also people’s names include Bradley, Cordelia, Edna, Franklin, Glenn, Irwin, Julian, Milton, Olive, Quincy, Raymond, Ryan, Selma, Tracy, Victor and Vincent, to list just some. Once kids get the hang of this game, they can come up with categories of their own, such as place names that are also animals, flowers or things you can eat. Or places you might not want to live, like Pothole Valley, Damnation Peak, Devil’s Nose, Tomb’s Creek, Tragedy Spring, Yellowjacket Mountain and Funeral Peak.

You can download instructions for making lift-the-flap books and other single-sheet formats by clicking here.

How to Make Books is a must-have book for beginning book artists of all ages, for teachers who enliven their lessons with bookmaking, for families looking for smart, artful projects—indeed for any and all creative souls.

Its author is Esther K. Smith, and the book reflects her flair as a book artist and the clarity that comes from being a long-time instructor. Its projects range from “instant books” made from a single sheet of paper to accordions, from short sewn books to thicker volumes with more elaborate sewing, plus combinations and variations of the many binding techniques it presents. All of these are illustrated both with colorful, easy-to-follow drawings and with photographs of artists’ books that correspond to those instructions and that were made at Purgatory Pie Press, the letterpress studio that Smith and her husband Dikko Faust run.

I chose the how-to diagrams above not only because they’re typical of the book’s artistry but also because they correspond to many of the kids’ books pictured throughout this site. The brown one, for example, shows the steps for making the pocket book that serves as a masthead for Bookmaking With Kids. And the green one shows the basic folds for single-sheet books with eight panels.

Coming soon: Smith’s second how-to book, called Magic Books & Paper Toys.

You can probably tell I love maps. I think they’re beautiful and fascinating, and I can pore over them endlessly with the same cheerful abandon that I bring to reading dictionaries.

And I’ve somehow managed to convince kids that maps, used as ingredients in hand-
made books, are artistic, informative and fun.

This book is much the same format as the ones in Favorite Places and I Am Sooo Lost: just a single sheet folded in quarters. And it turns the business of learning to read the rows and columns of a map into a quest. Click here for instructions.

When Babar reappeared after World War II in a new story, many readers didn’t realize that the book was not the work of his creator, Jean de Brunhoff. The look and character of the elephant king, his family and friends, were true to the first seven books. But de Brunhoff had died in 1937, and the new author/illustrator was, in fact, his son Laurent. It was a remarkable a feat—reviv-
ing the series, preserving the beloved essentials yet allowing the characters to change and flourish. And it continues still with the publica-
tion this year of Babar Comes to America.

I had promised myself a visit to an exhibition of working drawings for the first Babar books by father and son at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and I did indeed make it there.

What struck me most was the artistic constancy of the books over the past 77 years (!) and yet the radical difference in artistic approach of father and son. You can see it in these two illustrations. The pencil sketch is Jean de Brunhoff’s, the watercolor Laurent de Brunhoff’s. The father created with lines, adding color only at the last moment. The son starts with an abundance of color, taming it with lines only at the last moment.

The contrast is surprising and wonderful, and if you happen to be in New York before the show closes on January 4th, I hope you can see it.

Here’s a single-sheet book that’s simple enough for kinder-
gartners but easily tweaked to ramp up the challenge for kids through
4th grade.

It’s just a single sheet of paper (11×17 is best) folded in half lengthwise, then folded in half again to yield front and back covers and an inside spread. No cutting necessary.

Just follow the diagrams below, or download in-
structions by clicking here.

What goes inside? For kindergarten, you could give the kids pictures of themselves, their school and a recognizable landmark or two to cut up and glue inside. For 1st grade, you could have the kids combine photos (the kids, the school) with their drawings of neighborhood places—library, fire house, police station, corner store, park, laundromat, and the like. For 2nd through 4th grades, snippets from actual maps can join the mix to complement your geography focus.

If you live in a tourist town, as I do, it’s easy to pick up local maps to use as collage materials and in map-reading exercises. American Automobile Association offices often give away old maps. And both SCRAP and RAFT almost always have road maps on hand. Online, I like National Geographics’ Xpeditions Atlas as a source for downloadable outline maps. It provides maps of the world, the continents, the Middle East, the U.S. and each individual state, and our neighboring countries, and gives you a choice of printing them with or without geographic details, place names and political boundaries.

SCRAP, the Scroungers Center for Reusable Art Parts, turned 30 this year and as part of its birthday celebrations there’s an exhibition called Recollections: Celebrating 30 Years of SCRAP, showcasing Bay Area artists whose work represents SCRAP’s ethos of creative reuse.

The show runs from November 3rd through November 25th at the Market Street Gallery, 1554 Market Street near Van Ness, with an opening reception November 15th from 6–8 p.m. You can read more about the exhibition here.

SCRAP tops my list of local sources for bookmaking supplies. Inexpensive, too! My favorite—and recurrent— finds there include calendars, rubber stamps, National Geographic magazines, maps, folders, envelopes, cards, buttons, ribbons and more. Click here for hours and directions.

Happy birthday, SCRAP, and many more!

My colleague Susie devised a nifty triangle-shaped accordion book as a way for kids to make sense of the food pyramid. The idea was for kids to fill each page with pictures of foods in a given category—by drawing their own, using food stickers, coloring line art, cutting up cooking-magazine photos, or all of the above. It was an invitation to make a mess, and kids loved it.

You’d think that so constructivist an activity would really help nutritional concepts sink in. Well, maybe it did. But I suspect this satiric view of the food pyramid tells a more enduring truth about kids!

The cartoon is by Tom Fishburne; read what he says about it on his blog. You can see more of his work here.

I like nonsense.
And I think it has
an important place in the classroom.
To show that I’m in good company, here’s a quotation from Dr. Seuss:

“I like nonsense;
it wakes up the
brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary in-
gredient in living.”

Adding a bit of nonsense to the business of learning to read maps, I came up with this pop-up book. On the inside, it combines a snippet from a real street map, a goofy stick figure and two speech balloons. On the back there’s room for kids to write out the directions they might offer to so hapless a visitor.

I like to let the kids choose both the visitor’s destination and current location. That way they have complete “ownership” of this activity and they’re often more engaged as a result.

Here’s what the pop-up structure looks like before kids start drawing, collaging and writing. It’s called a box pop-up, and you can download wonderfully clear pictorial instructions for folding and cutting the pop-up by clicking here. These directions are from the ABC Curriculum: Art, Books & Creativity, developed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and I urge you to take a look at the whole program.