Let's Make a Book

It started with stamps and ink, just decorating paper, but it ended as a book my four year old is very proud of.  And now book making has become a regular part of our learning activities.

My four year old daughter had a few pages full of stamps, many of them from my Christmas stamp collection.  We cut out some of the pictures into square pages and stapled them together.  On the back pages, I wrote words to describe the next page, mostly dictated by my daughter.  It was a pretty simple book.  It said something like, "two penguins" or "a black bird" on one page and "a gold bird" on another.  Some pages actually had a whole sentence.  But it was a fun activity and my daughter was proud she could "read" this book to everyone.

That was several months ago and we are trying new things with our book making.  I bought some stickers that she helped me pick out.  We make a book out of some small pages stapled together (like a forth page). She puts one or two stickers on each page and then she writes one or two words describing it.  This has become our spelling and handwriting practice.  She is able to sound out a lot of words for herself, but I help her as she needs help.  So far, it has been a lot of animal stickers - cow, horse, cat, fox, bug, sheep, pig, etc. (very doable words).  But we also have lots more stickers in our collection that we are working toward - sun, star, barn, tree, ball, and harder words like butterfly, shovel, etc.  She sometimes wants to write adjectives as well "black, pink, sparkily, small" or numbers if she puts on more stickers - 5 butterflies, 3 stars, etc.

I bought a storymaking kit ($10 at Wal-mart).  It had two hard bound books, that have lines for writing at the bottom of each page and blank space at the top for illustrations.  It also came with 100 stickers and some markers, for the illustration part.  We have started working on that a little.  At first I had envisioned my daughter actually doing all the writing and illustrating herself, but in our planning phase, she came up with quite the elaborate story.  I wrote what she dictated and she is working on illustrating it.  ...

Other ideas for using book making for teaching, is to make a book to review what you have recently learned.  I purchased some planet stickers and we will eventually make a book out of these stickers, labeling them.  This type of activity could be done with any number of topics.  You could use stickers, stamps, cut outs from magazines or drawings and the words can be simple or an elaborate description, whatever fits the topic and the interest and ability of your child.

I love the idea of making books, because it is so versatile.  It keeps the learning interesting and interactive and at the end the child has something to show off what they are learning.