One of the projects that I taught this spring, which is requested repeatedly, is an accordion book with pockets. It’s gone through many variations, according to teacher priorities, but the uniting theme has been that it’s a place for emerging readers to store sight word flash cards so that the children have something to revisit over the summer, to help them remember what they’ve learned during the school year.
I was able to let this familiar structure nudge me into some new territory. As I mentioned, in my previous posts , continuous discovery is what keeps me interested in doing this work. But I am getting ahead of myself….
The book structure starts with a long narrow strip, about 8.5″ x 24.” In the interest of time, the middle fold is pre-folded for the 5 year-olds that I’m working with. They do the valley folds to the left and right of the middle. We definitely spend time working carefully.
Next comes folding five origami pockets (8-inch squares worked bet for this size book) which is always challenging with this age group. It’s also always exciting to see how so many of the children learn to independently make the pockets. I never get tired of watching five year-olds do origami.
If you are a good counter, you know that the inside of our accordion has 4 pages, but that there are 5 vowels. Fortunately for us, this accordion also has a front and a back. The front page is the cover of the book, and the back page we house the short u-vowel words.
I like to give the children a little embellishment to add to their books. This is such a a structured project that it’s really nice when I can find a way to encourage students to make their own decisions about something. In this case, because the teacher had given me five excellent words -bat, hen, pig, dog, and bug- I was motivated to do something I had never done before, which was create silhouettes of these short vowel animals, then produce them on my new Cricut cutter.
I never figured that I would get a Cricut, but, OMG I have been spending so much time cutting and scoring by hand for a so many recent projects that I decided to see if this tool could help me. It does. And the kids were delighted to add little creatures to their books.
Mostly, the students could glue down the silhouettes, but the bugs needed something different. Certainly I could have chosen to not create something with such delicate appendages, but I couldn’t resist the look of the dainty legs. I special ordered some 2.5″ clear circular labels, which encased and stuck down the specimens just fine.
Now this could be the end of this post and to my attention to this project, but I had made a bat that I thought was adorable. While it was there on my computer I thought I’d play around with it a bit.
I had just learned about a feature in Adobe Illustrator that was new to me: transform each. I could make a page of my endearing little bats, play with some settings, and the program creates all these variations. To me, it looks like they are coming into the picture at all different angles. I added the rotations, and did the scatter, so it took a good bit of time. But, what fun!
Oh, but that’s not all.
I’ve been working on making repeating patterns, so I had the bright idea to make a repeating pattern of clouds and put my bats on it. It was super hard for me to make a convincing repeat patterns of clouds and took a whole day of fussing in my graphic program.
This was simply crazy…it’s not the way I meant to spend a weekend day when it was beautiful out, but I couldn’t let it go until it was done. While I generally let my interests guide me, in this case it felt more the tail wagging the dog, as I have no real interest in making bat patterns. Still, I got it done.
Since I spent so much time on this, I needed to do something with it. I printed up the repeating pattern on to one for my favorite papers (Arches Johannot ), cut some Arches Superfine papers, and some black paper, found some black and white beads in my stash and made a little book with a pleated closure.
Do I need another little book in my life?
Hmph. Always.
Now enough of bats!
Playful Bookbinding and Paper Works 
Such great dainty bug legs! This is another inspiring post, Paula. I can see that kids would be so pleased with the results of their folding and learning in pockets. Thanks! Sarah
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