What I Do

Announcing a new page on my sidebar: Gallery of Student Work .

Now, here’s the back story.

 

A Page from my files

Last week,  at my daughter’s school. when I was bemoaning that my work schedule precluded my attendance at the next parent meeting,  a parent that I have known for years, and who l very much like, asked me what I do. It is hard to explain to people what it is that I do, which is one reason that I keep a blog.  But I realized that if I sent Lauri a link to my blog she would have to do a good bit of sifting through posts and more posts to see what I do.

Part of Pinterest Page for Bookzoompa

It occurred to me to direct her to Pinterest, to look at pins from Bookzoompa, but I this didn’t seem like the best solution, either.  It made me sad to realize that this blog hadn’t made it easy to answer the “What do you do?” question. But I had an idea. This is my idea:  http://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/gallery-of-student-work/  It’s a new page on the sidebar of my blog, which simply is photo after photo of work done by students that I have worked with.  Soon I hope to add more pages: one which puts all my tutorials in one place;  and another that shows the work that I do when I am not working with students.

Please take a peek at this new page and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Book-Figures

Lady Wearing a Pink Pillbox Hat

Each season that I am involved with classroom bookmaking students nudge me into making discoveries about how to think about bookmaking.  This year one of the  lessons that I walk away with is how satisfying it can be to bond with the bookmaking process through a personalized book-figure. Okay, that’s not a real term, but I don’t know what else to call it.

Brianna’s Flower

What I noticed was that once a child created an image for their book that they could sort of anthropomorphize they seemed to connect and care more about their subject matter and their book. For instance Brianna’s Flower (above) became a personal extension of herself, so her project became very much her very own, rather than just another assignment.

Charlie’s Dinosaurs

This connection seemed to be made if it was a fantasy flower, an extinct animal….

Endangered Animals…black and white drawings downloaded from the Enchanted Learning website. To give the animals more personality the students enhanced the eyes by making them bigger and defining the area around the eyeball.

…or endangered animals. When I started to noticing how students made connections to their books through these figures I began to encourage them to feel free rein while enhancing them through color….which led to some extravagant and lovely results.

Two women

I can’t remember who the ladies are in the photo above, but I like their taste in clothing.

Here’s the president and his wife, as created by the hands of second graders who were researching famous people.

chick

By the time I worked with first graders on their chick project I had figured out that the first thing we should do is cut out a chick (everyone had the same chick pattern to cut out).  I knew enough to encourage each child to give their own chick a personality by making an expressive eye,  giving the beak some color and shape and considering the shape of the wing.  If a chick became temporarily misplaced before we attached it into the book, the student would look for it as if she were looking for a personal friend, and it was a sweet reunion once the chick was found. 

 When I worked with second graders on their flower and plant book I told them not to worry about making a particular flower, but , instead to create a flower according to their own ideas about what would attract the kind of bee they want to be visited upon.  I loved the flowers that these students came up with! The most interesting thing that happened, though, was that as these book-figures developed I realized that, through these book figures, even I was connecting to the students books in a more personalized way.  One day I had to make a stop at a school sometime after my residency ended.  The completed projects were on display, and I had time to take a look at them.  One of the books housed the lady in the pink pillbox hat,  shown in the first photo of this post. She was such a character that I had to go back again with my camera to make sure I had a record of her. Fortunately, by the time I caught up with the teacher, Mr. Terri -who also happened to be the teacher who came up the concept of this project- the pink hatted lady was still in the classroom.  I would have been truly despondent had she gone home without  my photographing her.  Just a couple of days ago I showed her image to my friend, Ed. I was absolutely delighted that he immediately and correctly guessed her identity.

Here she is again, my book-figure friend Jackie Kennedy saying good-bye for  me as I am about to sign off on classroom bookmaking for the 2011-2012 school year.

A Fold-Up Dinosaur Diorama

  

Dinosaur book and folder

There is generally one project that I am most smitten by each year. This year’s dinosaur project, which first grade teacher Mrs. Kaveny and I put together, is my star of the season.

Here's the Generic Dinosaur Sample Book that I Made to Show Students

We folded two 11″ x 17″ cover weight papers, a blue paper for the background, and a white paper for the foreground. Using pre-pressed score lines, students folded the sides of the white paper in 4.25″ on both sides, so that the paper closed like a set of french doors. We added a pop-up on the left  fold, and cut curvy mountain ranges on the top edge.  The blue paper was folded just a bit differently than the white so that the papers overlapped in an interesting way.

Jake's Dinosaurs

For me, the highlight of the project was bonding to our dinosaurs. Students were assigned a specific dinosaur. The librarian, Mrs. Fields, downloaded line drawings of dinosaurs from the Enchanted Learning website then students colored in their dinosaurs. Mrs. Kaveny and I both agreed that no one really knows what colors bedecked the dino’s bodies, so these  7-year old artists used colors at their own discretion. After the coloring was done, I took their drawings home, scanned them into my computer,  then copied the image three times, doing some shrinking and stretching, so that I was able to hand back three dinosaurs -a family!- to grace inside of the book.

Of course we needed to insert the research writing. There are two books within this book. On the right hand panel there’s a folded page which contained “fast facts.” In the center of the book there is a pocket which contains another book, which is filled with complete sentences and paragraphs.

Here’s what the pages for the writing looked like in my sample. After the part of the project that I facilitated was done, my time at the school was over, so I didn’t have a chance to see the project completed. Students did the writing and the rest of the landscape decoration with their teacher.

The finishing touch to the book was Mrs. Kaveny’s title for the book, Dino Details. We cut out the title in the shape of a dinosaur egg and made a crack. The students were talking about adding a baby dino on the cover too. Wish I had thought of that!

Graphic Design Elements for First Graders

Book Covers Designed by First graders

Book cover design has its challenges for all ages.  When the books that I make with children have a title page,  rather than repeat the title page info up front,  I like students to design a visually stunning cover. I used to give first graders lots of bits of cut paper, with the directions that they should cut and glue a nice design on to their covers. Those of you who work with first graders know exactly how that goes…..I’ve tried many approaches to the cover graphics, and recently I tried something out that is an elementary version of something I have done with adults. I was happy with the results, so here it is.

2'" x 8" strips of paper, plus assorted bits

I started out by letting students pick just one strip of 2″ x 8″ paper. They then took just two small pieces of paper from an assortment of bits of paper that were in a box. The technique that I encouraged was specific:

• make just three or four cuts in the larger paper, to create small cut-outs
• make just one cut in just one of the smaller pieces
• arrange the papers on the cover so that the cut-outs from the larger paper are near to the places they were cut from
• arrange the other piece as desired and glue down well.

I think I also mentioned something about “less is more” to these budding graphic designers. Most of the students were able to resist the urge to cut and paste any which way, and they came up with a variety of really fine book covers.

Modern Art Design Covers by First Graders

An added bonus to this technique, besides looking good it took only minutes for these designs to be completed.

Now, here’s some cut paper designs, using a similar method of working, that I do with adults.

Cut Paper Designs by a Grown-Up

 Most first graders aren’t up to creatively cutting long edges of paper, but that will change in a few years. For now, a few snips here and there, and thoughtful placement works just fine.