bookmaking with children

Last week, Imogen and I spent a glorious morning picking strawberries.

The morning was followed by a blitz of chopping, canning, baking and whipping. All of which I tried to document with pictures. Why? Because we planned to write a book about our adventures!

The basic process was pretty simple. I took a ton of photos, printed off a contact type sheet to make sure I included all the pictures that were important to Imogen (the turtle and the dog). Then I went ahead and printed them off in a book format, half sheet of paper, double sided.

A friend/coworker told me about the way she used to make books with her first grade class, and it seem like such an easy way to make the book into something special and meaningful.

What you will need:

• Cardboard – two pieces cut about a half-inch bigger than your book
• Cloth
• Glue stick
• Decorative paper (optional). If not using, you will need extra plain paper to attach to the cardboard. I think it might help if these pieces were cut the same size as the cardboard
• Stapler
• Scrap paper
• Book already assembled (Next time I will have it already stapled. I stapled mine after we wrote, and some words disappear in the binding!)

What we did:

• With the book in front of us, we went through the pages and remembered what all we did that day. I then told Imogen that she could tell me the story of the pictures and I would write it down and we were going to make it into a book (she already knew we were going to make a book, but this was still the way I introduced the whole bookmaking/collaborative story writing concept).

• We looked at the first picture, and I asked her what she would like to write about it. As she told me, I quickly wrote it on the scrap paper. When she was finished, I read it back to her to make sure the words were right, she edited as needed, I then wrote the words in the actual book.

• As we went on, her story for each picture grew more detailed and she wanted to help write the words.
• Once we were done we stapled the decorative paper, pretty sides touching the book pages, to the book.
• Next we placed the cardboard on the fabric with a quarter inch gap between the two pieces.

• Cut your cloth so there is about a quarter to a half-inch fabric over hang around the cardboard.

• Liberally apply glue to the cardboard and place glue side down on the fabric
• Glue edges to cardboard, folding as you go. When in doubt, add more glue.

• Cover the interior of the cardboard with glue, attach the front page of the book (decorative paper). Repeat for the last page of the book. Next time, I am going to try making these cover pages the same size as the cardboard, mine barely reached the folded fabric.

• Allow to dry
• Read!

Booking making with children is a perfect literacy activity.

First, it is a delightful, engaging and interactive way to get children excited about writing and reading. Taking their words and writing them down, verbatim, tells them that what they have to say is important and meaningful. They have a story to tell that we want to hear and we want to share it with them.

Then, the actual process of writing the words in front of the child highlights pencil grip, letter formation and the process of writing. I  should have switched pens, mine was slippery and I was writing too fast and not focusing on my own letter formation. Without making it too laborious you can simply say, ‘this is the end of a sentence, I am going to put a period,’ or sound out simple words as you write them. But, don’t do this for every word, that would become tedious and take away from the fun and enjoyable part of bookmaking!

For the emergent reader, writing a story together is a good way to start developing a concept of word. Concept of word is the child’s knowledge of speech as it relates to print. It starts as simply knowing where the words start on the page, and that you move from left to right as you read. It then progresses to understanding that writing and language is made of separate words, and that those spaces in between two words are necessary.

This is why it is important for us to model pointing at text when we read to children (and when it is natural, and not take it so far that the pointing becomes distracting to us and the children!) As you write down her words and read them back to the child, she sees how her words look on paper, how the letters relate to the sounds and how the spaces separate the words.

For older children, bookmaking and collaborative story writing are great ways to introduce sight words and nonphonetic words into an early readers fluency bank. When the child dictates the story, it will be full of words that are most likely beyond her reading level. However, since the child is familiar with the story, with a little bit of support, she most likely will be able to reread the story. As you reread the story with her, and then she reads it on her own, she will begin to remember and internalize these words.

All repeated reading increase fluency. This goes along with the above for the early reader. The more interaction that an early reader has with a familiar text, the more they remember and internalize the words. This improves her fluency with not only the familiar book, but also general fluency.

Basically, write a book together, it’s fun.

 

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