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!

Book Unit and Lettering Samples

Click to enlarge!

I wanted to do a Books and Authors unit for Malachi's sake this year, because he's been so into writing lately (see here! and that isn't even his first novel—it's about his fourth. He is getting really good!) and it seemed like a fun "spine" into which many different areas could be connected! It turned out really interesting and fun. 

We started with an overview of the history of writing, then moved into paper making, bookmaking, bookbinding, printing, the printing press, libraries, etc.

Then we moved on to types of writing and story, and ended with an overview of a bunch of different genres, reading representative stories and, at night, watching a typical movie from each genre. So much fun!! I had Malachi teach us a class on story structure and it was amazing. He is a wonderful teacher! He made it so interesting and accessible. It made me resolve to have him teach more often!

Clementine loves to come sit on Malachi's lap while he's writing. He says, "Do you want to be my little helper?" and she happily snuggles in with him and pushes buttons and points at things and asks questions and just generally makes herself "useful." Ha! So cute.

We've been gradually adding built-in shelves to this room since we moved in, and it was fun that during this unit this whole wall got completed. We call this room the Library and now it really feels like one!

I asked my dear friend (and writing partner) Rachael to do a lesson for us over FaceTime as our Guest Author. It was so good! She's the best. She's written three amazing books about her ancestors, as well as our book, of course!

We did an activity where we learned about fonts and fancy lettering styles, and then tried to learn/copy some of them ourselves. The girls loved this! Marigold, especially, loves fancy calligraphy. I loved what she came up with!

Look at the tiny little bunnies dancing around that "Eve"!

Junie's beautiful lettering

Junie's Pig Alphabet (Pigphabet?)

Daisy worked a long time to get the letters in her name exactly right! They look beautiful!

Authors Week

This was a really fun week that I have hardly any pictures of! When I planned this, I was remembering the "Young Author's Conference" that we used to have when I was in Elementary School. You had to write and illustrate (and put together) your own book in order to be eligible. Once you had done that, you had the privilege of attending the all-day conference (while everyone else was slaving away in their regular classes!). You got to read/tell about your book to everyone else, and then there were writing workshops and guest authors, and you got to eat your lunch in the faculty room, and best of all there were donuts or some other refreshments at the end of the day! I remember it very fondly, as you can tell, and I wanted to find some way we could have a similarly fun experience with the writing process, start to finish. 

We did spend some time on basic story structure, but I also wanted to study some different authors' lives, so I read quite a few (meant-for-adults) biographies of children's book authors that we like. I picked the best ones (some were very depressing, and/or shocking---like Lewis Carroll! Goodness!) to summarize for the kids, and then we also found several shorter, meant-for-children biographies that I read to them. Nothing really stellar. "Biographies for children," as a genre, is clearly in need of some new talent. The ones I found were either cloyingly insipid ("Young Ted never did well in school, but once he just believed in himself he was stunningly successful!") or achingly dull ("After many years at Punch, an English Literary Magazine, Arthur became interested in theater criticism . . .").

Every day we worked on some new aspect of writing their stories. Daisy and Malachi insisted on being included, so they dictated their stories to me and I wrote them down. (Daisy is surprisingly attached to her book. She gets it out and pores over it, even by herself, every day, and loves to have it read to her.) 

By the end of the week (after much work---copying the final drafts took the most time, and I ended up typing the last few pages for even Abe and Seb, since I decided the point of this was not handwriting technique, though they did get several hours' worth of that), we were ready to bind our books! This was very, very exciting for the children. But when we went to the Kinko's/FedEx copy store, the guy told us it would be $19 to laminate and bind (simple spiral binding) ONE BOOK. What?!? We went to Stevenson's in Provo the next day instead, and did all four books for under $9, so let that be a lesson to you! :)

In order for us to have the full, Young-Author-y experience I was envisioning, however, our week needed a GUEST AUTHOR. Luckily, I had one in mind: our friend Kristen Randle. I had read some of her books when I was in high school, but I rediscovered her as an adult and liked her newer books even better (and even did a bit of editing for her). Best of all, I knew she was a fascinating person to talk to, and good with children. And she graciously agreed to come be our GUEST AUTHOR. Hooray!

And she was SO good. Warm and funny and down-to-earth. She taught the children all about the history of books---bookbinding---publication---the printing process---and a bunch of other things---and she helped them create a character and the bare bones of a plot which we were supposed to continue working on later. (And we will---though we haven't yet.) We were SO enthralled by her.

And of course, we had a delicious AUTHORS LUNCH, with fancy luncheon-type foods which we only have on special occasions and which the children helped me prepare: vegetable bars and artichoke dip and homemade hot cocoa in the crockpot.  So that made us all feel very fancy. All in all, it was a lovely week!