Book Making

Instead of attending a regular Methods I class period, we decided to venture out to Peterborough, New Hampshire to go to the Mariposa Museum. We participated in a wonderful lesson about puppets through the years and which countries they come from; which is something that I will definitely be adding to my own lessons one day!

We had some time to shop in the gift shop before our lesson started. There were so many beautiful items that I wanted to buy them all!

Beautiful hand painted elephants at the museum.

I have to say, though, my favorite part of the trip was the book-making session.

Finished product along with the steps to create it on the right!

We focused on making accordion books, and the woman who taught the class had so many wonderful examples for us to look at and use! She taught us how to create the books in a few easy steps:

1. Using a light weight piece of cardboard, cut two rectangles that are equal in size. These will be used for the cover.
2. Find pieces of scrapbook paper and cut them so that they are at least an inch bigger than your cardboard pieces all the way around.
3. Place your cardboard pieces onto the scrapbook papers, making sure that you can see the border of the scrapbook paper underneath it.
4. Using another thin piece of cardboard, place it against the corners of the cardboard and make diagonal lines across the corners. Cut those corners off.
5. Fold the corners of the scrapbook paper over the corners after gluing the cardboard to the paper. Glue the paper down for the inside part of the cover.
6. Place a ribbon on one side of the cover.
7. Make opposite "M" or "W" folds with a long piece of card stock paper for your pages. 
8. Glue one side of the card stock pages to the inside of the front and back covers.
9. Tie your ribbon to close the book! 

Finished product, showing off the pages.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to use these book-making activities in my lessons! Next semester in Methods II I will be focusing on science and math content areas; wouldn't these books be perfect for a little science unit wrap-up? I think so!