Popscicle Sticks, Stick’ems, Pipe Cleaners and Hair Band Book
June 15, 2011
The school year is just about over in this part of the world. At Indian Lake Central School the staff puts together a really cool thing for the last full week of school. They call it Heritage Week. It’s a brilliant concept: for five days the curriculum revolves around exploring different facets of the town of Indian Lake, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Included in the week are visits to the Adirondack Museum, visits with local storytellers and songwriters, and research about historical places and people. And guess what: they need a book which they can fill with pictures and information gathered during the week! That’s where I fit in.
My job is to help students make books which are added to at intervals during Heritage Week. I have only about 50 minutes to help each group of students make their books, start to finish. I was pleased at how this particular book, for the first, second and third graders, worked out. Each student started out by picking out two pieces of cover wieight paper. One paper was standard sized 8 1/2″ x 11″, the other was twice a big, 11” x 17″. We then used a three hole punch to put holes on the one of edge of each paper.
The corners of the bigger paper were then folded to the middle (like what you do when making a paper airplane). The tip of the resulting triangle was then folded down about an inch and a half.
Students applied just a bit of glue to the holed end of the smaller paper, lined up the holes of the two papers and pressed.
What really holds these two papers together, though, are the two pipe cleaners that are laced through the holes.
The pipe cleaners do double duty: they hold the cover papers together, and they act as posts to bind together loose sheets of paper. After a few sheets of paper were inserted into their books I instructed the students to just bend the pipe cleaners down without twisting them or otherwise securing them. Just lifting up the pipe cleaners is what will make it easy to add more pages as the week progresses. After inserting the inside pages students folded the covers around the papers.
Because it’s so close to the end of the school year, I especially wanted to introduce some whimsy. The sparkly pipe clearers were just one of the fun elements that the students used. After the books were assemble I laid out colored popscicle sticks and square sticky-backed “jewels” for cover decoration.
I thought the coolest part of this project was the closure. If you remember, back in the first step I mentioned that the students folded down the tip of the triangle at the edge of the paper. I had them snip a tiny slit at each edge of the triangle. then we slipped a rubber hair band around the fold, making sure the hair band fit into the slits.
On the cover of each book in just the right place we attached a paper fastener, thus creating an awesome closure. Hurrah!
