Easy Book Binding Half Sheet for Kids
I've just noticed that I am more apt to blog about a project before I do it with kids when I am very nervous about how it will turn out.
I was very nervous about most of the projects that I wrote about in my last post.
Making beautiful drawing journals in one class period is challenging. I'm relieved to say that the day of bookmaking went really well.
This post will mostly be a photo essay of making five styles of books, with kids ages 4 though 11.
The Pre-K kids immediately started to fill their books with drawings, and lost no time showing off their creations to each other.
Kindergartners did a simple rubber-band and stick binding. They all wanted to decorate their sticks. Most of the students tended towards making animal shapes with the bling.
The big surprise of the day, for me, was both how quickly the first graders finished their project and how amazingly beautiful they turned out. These books took them only twenty minutes to make.
Knowing what I know now I would slow the project down and help the kids less. I was so nervous about how this project would go.
Wallpaper-sample covers were simply glued on. These look so good to me.
The modified pamphlet stitch book with pocketed covers made by 2nd & 3rd graders was the only project that I've done so often with students that I knew it would go well.
The highlight of the day, for me, was making these sewn journals with 4th & 5th graders.
The book block was made from 4 pieces of 11″ x 17″ papers folding into origami pamphlets, then sewn together side-by-side. All the holes for sewing were punched by paper punches.
Wallpaper-sample covers were attached by threading ribbons through holes in the cover and endpapers.
This project ran a bit over time. We were suppose to finish in 45 minuets, but it took 50 minutes. No one complained 🙂
These books, like most of the other books made yesterday, were constructed without glue, The only exception is the envelope books. I didn't exclude the use of glue intentionally, but I guess I think about glueless structures more often than not.
This was the last class of this school season. Now I can get back to some housecleaning.
I am ending this season happy!
I will be heading up to the Adirondacks in the morning to work with students, helping them make drawing journals. I get thirty to forty-five minutes with each class. On Tuesday the students spend time with the talented, stupendous, creative scientist/artist Sheri Amsel, who will work with these same students, teaching them to draw nature.
I am so jealous these kids get to spend time with Sheri. Her drawings look like this:
I am creating this post as I pack for tomorrow. I've designed these projects one right after another, and we will be making the books in such a compressed amount of time tomorrow, that I might forget to take photos, and I might forget what we did…I like these projects so much that I don't want to forget them.
The photo above and the one at the top is the project for the first graders. (I am packing the projects in the reverse order that I am seeing the classes -which is how I hope to stay organized.) This is a thick little book whose pages are made by sliding the flap of an envelope into another envelope, them repeating until the desired number of pages are achieved. The whole book block gets wrapped in a long piece of decorative paper.
Second and third graders will sew pages together, attaching beads on the spine, and using specialty papers for the book cover, and paper punched winged things as embellishments.
The inside cover of the book has pockets, and more embellishments. The theme of this week at the school is roots and wings.
Kindergartners will be making a book on a stick. These are long half-sheets of paper, folded in half (closed, the book block measures 5.5″ x 4.25″), bound with a #33 rubber band. The sticks are like the stir-sticks that Starbucks has out on creamer counter. If we can find sticks from outside to use, I'd like that. A big part of my thinking in putting together these projects is trying to get students to see that they can make a book anytime they want, using available materials.
Front is decorated with bling. Maybe I will get students to make a design like mine, which references the Fibonacci sequence… no reason not to! (hmm, one of my blings fell off, see it there in the background…messed up my numbers. Oh well.)
The pre-k crowd will be making these stab "sewn" books with this fun sky paper on the cover. Instead of threading anything, they will use craft pipe-cleaners for the binding. Decorate with stick-on clouds, a few simple birds in flight?, and a one and three-quarter inch radiant sun.
Finally, now packing my first project of the day. This is for the fourth and fifth graders. It's a four-signature book (each signature is an origami pamphlet folded from 11″ x 17″ paper) sewn together with shoelace tipped yarn. The holes will be punched with a regular punch, as are holes in the cover that the ribbons are threaded through.
It's the ribbons that hold the cover to the book block. The covers are wallpaper samples pieces. I have a pile that the kids can choose from.
Okay, now to remember to pack glue sticks, scissors, and then pack up the car and g o t o s l e e p .
Oh my gosh, working with second grade students is so rich.
They have skills, they are enthusiastic and uninhibited, and tapping into their learning curve is delightful.
I'm working with three sections with about 22 students per class, so I'm getting to see about 66 different ways that students are making sense of the 100 cents project that I described in my last post. (oh, there's an unintended pun in that last sentence…)
Short recap: students were given images of coins, which add up to $3.00, from which they chose $1.00, or 100 cents, worth of coins to create a design.
These students hadn't started studying money yet, which was fine. Most students seemed to understand how much coins were worth, though certainly a few students had no idea about the value of coins.
It was fun, when adding up the value of nickels, to say, Now you know why it comes in handy to count by fives.
Making the wallet-book to house the 100 cent images, then making the images was what we got done on the first day. Separating out 100 cents was certainly the most challenging part of the project. The designs flowed freely.
Day 2 was a bit more challenging, but I think that the toughest part was just communicating to them what I was looking for, which was for the students to make matching arrays of the coins that they used in their designs, then providing the equation which showed that the value of the coins equal 100.
Turns out that this array-making uncovered a few mistakes. For instance the airplane pictures above was five cents short, so he added a nickel on to the bottom and all was well.
There was a wide range of simplicity to complication of images.
If students didn't have enough coins of a certain value left from their original 300 cent to making the matching array, they would exchange change with another student, at least that was the plan, which worked fairly well. I did bring lots of extra coins, for moments when it seemed better just to hand students what they needed.
Still, everyone should have had 100 cents left over. These coins got glued on to a pocket of their wallet book, along with a statement of the value of these coins.
That little black folder that contains the 100 cent image now has an enlarged section of a colorful buck glued on to the front. After all that figuring and adding, it was great to end yesterday's class with some playful coloring in.
Okay, one more day with these students. The next piece that goes into the wallet-book has to do with combining shapes to make other shapes, much in the same way that we combined values of coins to make other values.
The most joyful moments during these days is having this opportunity to be a part of these early moments of learning about addition. When students say that they can't get their numbers to add up to 100, though they know that they do, I can sit with them and help them sort out what's going on. It's so illuminating for me hear them tell me what they've done, and then to help them see another way of interacting with the numbers.
Addendum: as soon as this post went up the generous and brilliant connector-of-all -things-math offered me this link to some other coin projects http://mathhombre.blogspot.com/2009/08/money-games.html
Simply awesome.
Addendum #2: here's the link to the final post of this project https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/fancy-plane-shapes/
Addendum #3, April 2019
AFter teaching this many times, one of the biggest changes I've made to this project is to hand out only $1.50 in coins at first, from which the students pick and choose and count to make their $1.00 designs. They each get 10 pennies, 6 dimes, 6 nickels and two quarters. Then I give out the appropriate number of coins in arrays for the second page.
BIG TIP: Before teaching this class I encourage the teachers to get the kids practice doing their skip counting starting at a place other than zero. Also, I think it would be helpful for kids to skip count by 25's before starting their money unit.
Tomorrow I will be starting a new project with second graders. Counting money is part of their curriculum, so both the math specialist and teachers liked the idea of addressing money in our book making project. This is a first for me. I've never even thought about folding money concepts into bookmaking.
I let my thinking about this be inspired by the idea of the Hundred-Face challenge that Simon Gregg and Malke Rosenfeld have written about, in which students use Cuisenaire Rods to make silly fun faces that have the added value of adding up to 100 (depending on its length, each rod has a value 1 – 10). Okay, great! We can make designs that out of images of quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies!
I created sheets of coins, being mindful that the coins were the actual size of their reality counterparts.
The idea will be to count out one dollar worth of coins, then take that mess,
and make something, anything. Could be a pleasing abstract arrangement, could be a face, a person, a rocket ship, letters, but it must add up to one dollar. Then make arrays with coins to make them easy to count. Since we're dealing with money, my thought was to make a….
…Wallet Book! Put an ID card on the front, a closure, a little bling…
… and pockets on the inside. There are two folders in the pockets here, the one I've written about, and another one that is about shapes, which I will write about at another time.
Something else about this 100 cent folder: its cover is a blow up of a dollar bill. This will be a nice lead-in to talking about a bit of history of printing, that before things were printed in color, making black engravings then coloring them in by hand was all the rage. Here's a hand-colored hummingbird from Getty Images of a hand painted engravings:
Now here's my hand-colored dollar, which the second graders, as they color their own, will get to know closely.
Why not? I mean, when else will they be able to color in a dollar? Or course it's an enlarged copy of just a portion of a dollar bill, so there's no temptation to try to use it as lunch money.
There's been many pieces to get together for this project.Here's the PDF of the coins and the image of the dollar. They are black and white files, which I printed on colored paper.
Now here's the video that I made of this part of the project, which I hope to show to the classes tomorrow. My thought is that if it's possible for them to view this on the Smart Boards in the classroom that it will be easier for the students to see. We'll see how that goes. I'm looking forward to seeing the designs that kids come up with, and wondering how hard this will be for them.
Addendum –
Here's the links to the posts of the students' work https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/making-books-with-money/ and https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/fancy-plane-shapes/
addendum , April 2019
AFter teaching this many times, one of the biggest changes I've made to this project is to hand out only $1.50 in coins at first, from which the students pick and choose and count to make their $1.00 designs. They each get 10 pennies, 6 dimes, 6 nickels and two quarters. Then I give out the appropriate number of coins in arrays for the second page.
BIG TIP: Before teaching this class I encourage the teachers to get the kids practice doing their skip counting starting at a place other than zero. Also, I think it would be helpful for kids to skip count by 25's before starting their money unit.
Source: https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/category/making-books-with-children/
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