Of the time we spend at home, we have to ration the time we spend looking at screens, because we already use them to study at home, to do homework, to watch movies…
In other articles, we have already suggested activities to “disconnect” from screens at home, and this one that we propose today seems to have a lot of qualities to develop the creativity of the little ones.
This activity involves not only writing but also creating a physical book, with all its elements, so that we can all handle and read it. And here’s the “recipe.”
Materials for making a homemade book
The essential materials for composing the book will be:
- Paper (several sheets)
- Cardboard or cardboard
- Staples, string, or glue
- Scissors, ruler, adhesive tape, paints, markers, felt…
Depending on the book cover design, you’ll want to use different materials—use whatever you can think of!
Once the book is made, it needs to have a purpose… If you make a blank book, you can use it as a diary (for example), but if you want to make a written book or a comic, the little ones should fill the pages before assembling the book, because loose sheets will be more manageable and easier to correct or replace in case of an accident 😀
Tell a story
The content of our book must be age-appropriate for each child; ultimately, the important thing is that each child can express themselves by “writing” their own book, but it doesn’t have to be a narrative book: it can be a picture book, a puzzle book, a letter book, a numbers book, a memory book, a recipe book…
Whatever story we tell, to create the book we will have to establish the design of the edition: (folio size or half folio, or “mini” format, for example), so that we can tell the story with the “template” of the book we choose.
If we choose half a sheet of paper, for example, we’ll need to fold the sheets, arrange them as we’ll assemble the pages in the book’s layout, and number the pages to tell the story in the correct order. If we choose a full sheet of paper, we can do the same, first joining the sheets along the edge with adhesive tape, or use a loose-leaf binding technique.
Once you’ve laid out all the pages of the book and numbered them, you need to fill them with content, following the numbering order. In addition to the writing, you can illustrate all or some pages and decorate the borders, for example, with flourishes, like in old books 🙂 In the text, you can tell a story or express thoughts or ideas… nothing more.
For the more adventurous, we propose writing and drawing a comic, caricaturing well-known “characters” from the family or inventing new characters, scenes and situations that will have to be drawn and accompanied by the typical speech bubbles, both for the dialogues between the different characters and for the reflections of each character.
The binding
Bookbinding itself is quite an activity. As we mentioned at the beginning, any element can be used to decorate the cover of our book, and you can find many tutorials online for bookbinding using different materials and techniques.
The important thing is that each child decorates the covers of their book however they like, and that they include all the elements of a real book, so that the whole thing is as authentic as possible: edition credits, date, mini-biography of the author, index or barcode 😀 To know what to put on the covers or book covers we can look at a school book or a comic.
On the book cover or lids you can play with all the materials you can think of: fabrics, origami figures, colored ribbons, macaroni, dried leaves, photos, or simply paints or markers, let your creativity fly!