Writing our own books

We learned a lot about bookmaking—both the physical process of it, binding and papermaking and pop-up books and signatures and folios and so forth—but also the process of writing and publishing a book; the different types of publishing and what steps a story goes through for editing, proofreading, graphic design, etc. before it's published. I had the children each plan and design a book or write a story to be "published"! It was a lot of fun. I was amazed at the things they came up with! I wanted to wait to publish this till Daisy had hers done, but she keeps forgetting to do the last things for it, so I'll have to update with hers in another post. She's taking longer than the others because she's writing a longer chapter book plus a cute shorter children's book!

Junie used my book formatting software, Vellum, to design and format her book. It's called "Yankee Doodle the Spy" and it's so cute. I love how it turned out. We had it printed and bound at Office Max.

Her favorite page was the "About the Author" page!

It was also fun because they did the wrong binding on her book, so then they reprinted it and did the correct binding and she got to have two copies!

Goldie's book was incredible. I'm still in awe because I've never seen anything like it before and I don't know HOW she came up with the idea! It's a story hidden inside a sort of playhouse. Here's the outside of it. She covered cardboard with wrapping paper and used a ribbon to lace it shut.

The spine

The back of the book, with instructions on how to read it

And here's how it looks when you open it up—a forest scene, and a little woodcutter's hut with furniture. (This all goes along with the story, of course.)

Inside the hut, the parts of the story are numbered on little sheets of paper, rolled up, and hidden inside the objects. So you can see the book on the stool has a #1 on it.

You open it up and find the first part of the story. Under that "once upon a time" page the book is actually a little box, and you can kind of see the tiny folded paper within the box. That's the story's first paragraph.

You can see the rolled up paper under this chair

And one hidden here in the picture frame and so forth.

There's even a tiny cake that sits on the table!

And the "copyright" mark is on some smoke coming out of the chimney! :) This is the cutest book ever. I love it so much!

Teddy wanted to make a nonfiction book with pictures in it from some of our trips. He made the cover and we laminated all the pages. Then we got it spiral-bound.

He chose his favorite pictures to print and arrange on the pages.

And added some of his own labeling :)

Such a good little author and a fun project.

I saved the most impressive for last. I didn't tell Malachi he had to write a book for this unit, because he's always writing and had already finished about 3 other books or novellas on his own. I did tell him he should work on formatting one of those books with the Vellum software, and maybe someday he could upload it to Amazon and print out some hard copies for himself. But I didn't really follow up or think that was urgent, just something he could do sometime.

Then, about a week after Mother's Day, I woke up to find a 300-page hardback book on my nightstand with a bow on it. It was by "Malachi Norris" (he's already decided that's his pen name…his first and middle) and I had never seen it before! And it was dedicated to me! I started crying as I read his sweet, funny, witty dedication page. It turns out he'd been working on this book for four months secretly, typing away at it when I thought he was doing other school work (which he also managed to keep up on, somehow!) and he'd enlisted Daisy's help with editing and Sam to draw the cover. Then he'd formatted it, uploaded it to a Barnes and Noble self-publishing platform, and ordered a copy—all without me having any idea what he was doing! I was completely amazed.

I was so excited to read it, and it didn't disappoint. It's a mystery story set in a cool fantasy world, and I was completely enthralled. I knew Malachi was a good writer, but I was still surprised at how I was able to absorb myself in his story and enjoy it so completely. I have a feeling Ky is going to be a great author someday! He's working on the sequel to this story now, and I can't wait!

Hooray for books and hooray for my little authors!