Teacher Features

Every year the San Francisco Education Fund provides grants to enterprising teachers who want to launch projects of their own devising, for their own students and/or the whole school community, and every spring the Ed Fund celebrates the teachers’ accomplishments with a showcase.

Whether you’ve gotten an Ed Fund grant or not, the showcase is an inspiring event. It features projects by the adults who count most in our schools—our teachers. And it shows how their ideas, put into practice, have changed classrooms for the better for our students.

Among the many exciting projects at last week’s showcase were two that integrated bookmaking into the language-arts curriculum. So naturally there were dozens and dozens of fantastic kids’ books on hand to peruse and admire; I spent an hour just reading!

One of these projects took place at Commodore Sloat Elementary School where teachers are in the second year of a program to enrich their Writer’s Workshop curriculum. The Sloat team researched and purchased new resources for teachers as well as children’s books chosen as compelling examples of different writing genres. Because a captivating book structure helps inspire lively writing, the project also included bookmaking sessions for teachers, with structures they could, in turn, teach to their students.. And finally, the entire school community got to make not one but three books at Sloat’s Family Literacy Night: My Incredible Fabulous Terrific Delightful Adventure Books, Pop-Up Valentines, and Baggie Books for Nature Collections.

Handmade books also abounded at the display by Bryant Elementary School, where six K–2 teachers had a project called Getting Creative with Houghton-Mifflin. Partnering with the San Francisco Center for the Book, the teachers matched bookmaking projects to numerous H-M units and co-taught students to make those books. Teachers independently provided students with follow-up lessons so they could write or draw in their books. They’ve also begun adapting books structures for other lessons, and students, too, have begun making books independently whenever time permits.

(If you’d like to get creative with Houghton-Mifflin, please consider the SFCB summer workshops on this topic. You can read about the K–2 workshop by clicking here, and this link will take you to a description of the 3–5 workshop.)

Kudos to the participating teachers at Bryant and Sloat, and many thanks to the Ed Fund for supporting creative teaching.

Kids at Wornick Jewish Day School helped mark Israel’s 60th anniversary by exhibiting more than 100 colorful, handmade books about Israel throughout the school.

Well in advance of the May 8th event, parents put together an afternoon enrichment session, planning six bookmaking workshops with three SFCB instructors for 120 kids, kindergartners through 6th graders! It was a remarkable feat of scheduling; the kids had a great time, and their eye-catching books were bursting with a mix of original art and photo collages, nonfiction writing and creative stories.

The kindergartners made Rubber-Band Books showcasing the flowers of Israel and using pencils decorated with the Hebrew alphabet as spine pieces. Kids in 1st grade made Lift-the-Flap Books with pictures of animals on the flaps and written details underneath. And the 2nd through 6th graders wrote themselves into stories they created in their Scenic Concertinas, the books pictured in the lower left of the photo.

Congratulations to the many parents who helped us at the SFCB make the book-arts afternoon a reality, and to the whole school community for admiring and honoring the children’s books.

Librarian Lisa Bishop, who masterminded the Flynn 500 bookmaking project earlier this year, has evidently recovered enough from the school-wide undertaking to get to work on the hundreds of photographs she took.

The photo above is the cover of the thank-you cards she recently sent out. She also sent several dozen snapshots to a web-based photo book service and ended up with a classy-looking hardcover book.

Eventually her photos will be all that’s left of the Flynn 500. Almost since the moment they finished them, Flynn students have been agitating to take their books home to share them anew with an audience of family and friends.

A happy footnote to the Flynn 500: Lisa was invited to present at the California School Library Association Conference in Sacramento this fall, with a talk called “Everyone’s a Writer: Energize Your School Community with a Writing Challenge.”

Kudos, Lisa!

We’re gearing up for our 2nd annual Summer Bookmaking Intensive for Teachers.

Starting June 20th and continuing on June 23rd through 26th, the San Francisco Center for the Book is offering 16 specially priced workshops where you can discover ideas and inspiration for a whole year of imaginative teaching.

These classes are exclusively for teachers, librarians, principals and arts educators. They focus principally on grades K–8 (but some are appropriate for high school, too). And all the workshops give you instantly usable projects, easy-to-follow instructions, and convincing evidence that making books with students is a fun and effective way of nurturing literacy and artistic expression across all areas of the curriculum.

Click here to download an overview in calendar form, like the one above. For complete details, please visit this page on the SFCB web site.

Got questions? Want more details? Need help deciding which classes will suit you best? Click here to email Cathy for fast, knowledgeable answers. To register, please call (415) 565-0565.

This nonsense name represents the order and frequency of use of the 12 most common letters in English. It was taped onto the Dice are Nice book-
making table at Saturday’s Teacher Open House. And it was this line-up that helped us deter-
mine which ABC stickers to put on the five dice we turned into a homemade Word Search game.

The game is a simplified version of Bogle—fewer dice, fewer rules. I find that it works fine with five dice. Conveniently, it also works as either a collaborative or competitive activity for a table of five kids. Here are some tips for labeling the 30 die faces that you can pass along to your students:

1. Place one vowel sticker on any face of each die.
2. Place a different vowel sticker on another face of each die.
3. Place the consonants stickers T, T, N, N, S, S, H, R, D and L on various faces of the dice.
4. Fill in the remaining 10 die faces with the consonants B, C, F, G, J, M, P, W, X, Y.

Next, students should fold a little four-panel accordion booklet and title it Word Search, with their name. Its dimensions will depend on the size of the box you’ve scrounged to hold the dice and booklets. The paper we used at the Teacher Open House was about 4″ high and 16″ long.

And now, let the game begin!

Students take turns rolling the dice, and each writes down all the words he or she can spot, from one to five letters. When each student has had a chance to roll the dice, kids can compare their word lists. Encourage older students who want to play competitively to make up a scoring system.

You’ll find a more sophisticated version of this game at RAFT—it’s called Word Wise—and you can download an idea sheet by clicking here.

For those of you who love the alphabet, you can find more about Etaoin Shrdlu on this Wikipedia page, at Fun with Words or this BBC page, among many others. A Google search will keep you reading happily for hours.

Many thanks to the Bay Area teachers, librarians and San Francisco Center for the Book volunteers who made yesterday’s Teacher Open House so fun and inspiring.

It was a perfect, outdoor sort of day, so I felt honored that two dozen people came to soak up bookmaking ideas at the Center. And many from quite a distance, too—San Ramon, Belmont, Petaluma, San Mateo, El Cerrito, Mountain View, Kensington.

Next time I’ll endeavor to have bags for you to carry off all the book models you made, extra templates, paper samples, instruction sheets, and the like.

Over the next few days there’ll be a series of posts on Teacher Features in answer to the many excellent questions raised at the open house. But let me answer a few right now:

• Where did the library book pockets come from? The best price I’ve found is from Brodart Library Supplies and Furnishings. The link for the pockets is here.
• Where did the paper for the 3D Panorama Books come from? It’s called Exact Vellum Bristol, 57 lbs, by Wausau, and I get it from Kelly Paper. Click here to find locations around the Bay Area.
• Is there a template to download for the 3D Panorama Books? Absolutely, just click here for an 11×17 PDF.
• Where did the supplies for the Dice Are Nice projects come from? All the different dice, the zippered baggies, the plastic boxes, the stickers and the paper for the accordion-fold booklets came from the Resource Area for Teachers in San Jose.

Check back here soon for posts with more downloadable templates, an instruction sheet for making single-sheet booklets, and a reminder about how to label the dice and booklets for the different language-arts and math Dice Are Nice games.

Explore a variety of bookmaking projects—for free—at the San Francisco Center for the Book this Saturday, April 12th, from 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

K–8 teachers can pick up bookmaking ideas to try in the months ahead; learn about SFCB field trips and classroom visits; discover book-arts resources and discuss ways to use bookmaking in the language arts, social studies and science curriculum.

Our featured projects include nifty little booklets for National Poem in Your Pocket Day coming up on April 17th, 3D foreground/background panoramas and folded booklets that use library card pockets for covers. And because we scored a treasure trove of plastic boxes in a recent shopping spree at RAFT, we’ve devised several roll-the-dice games that tuck into the boxes. Kids love putting number or letter stickers on the blank die faces, and that gets them engrossed in a variety of playful book projects for practicing math, spelling, parts of speech and more! Try it yourself, and you’ll be a believer.

Click here for directions.

The San Francisco Center for the Book is presenting this activity for free under its grant-funded program, The ABC Initiative: The Art of the Book in the Classroom. We are very grateful to our current funders The San Francisco Foundation, the Cisco Foundation and the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Many thanks!

April is National Poetry Month, and one of the niftiest ideas I’ve discovered for celebrating is Poem in Your Pocket Day.

The idea is to tuck a poem into your pocket on Thursday April 17th and share it with people throughout the day. You can find out more about this event at Poets.org, the web site of the Academy of American Poets, including fun and thoughtful ways to share the poem in your pocket.

Of course, poetry is even better when it’s in a book that kids make themselves. And what a happy coincidence that a single sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 paper folds up into a perfectly pocket-sized little booklet. Click here to see a collection of tiny poetry books in the Kids Book Gallery on the San Francisco Center for the Book web site.

Lots of adults—teachers, parents, volunteers, visitors—joined in the bookmaking fun at Flynn Elementary School throughout March. And I wanted to showcase a few of their books in these posts.

The book at the top left is by a Flynn graduate, now in her 20s, working as a graphic designer. Next, Yoko Koki, from San Francisco School Volunteers, wrote about ways to save the Earth. And 1st grade teacher Ms. Francisco, wrote about her love of knitting.

Thanks for writing and drawing, working and playing alongside the students.

I am a verbivore*. I’m always on the look-out for children’s writing that shows an early love of words (and books). So I was particularly charmed to discover these two books, both by 3rd graders, as I was reading and photographing the Flynn 500.

Here’s a snippet from the first one, by Tiana, called Books.

Their are many tipes of books. Their are ficcion books, nonficcion books and Fairy Tales. My favorite kind of book is beisball books. … It is good to read books. It can take you to far away places. Like Jupiter. … It comes in all languages. For all of us. If you don’t have a book, go to the book store. If you don’t have money to spend, go to the library. Get new books every time.…

Xiomarabella’s ambitious book, Alphabet Sport, Verb and Exercise Stories, presents a sport for (almost) every letter of the alphabet. Here are a few:

A is for acrobats. Like the time my sister jumped from the rope into the pool. B is for baseball … D is for dodge ball. E is for equestrian like when I rode a horse named Jack. … M is for well I don’t really know any sports that start with M. N is the same thing … W and X do not have sports. Y does not have a sport. And neither does Z. Now I have a challenge: Try every single sport, verb or exercise in this book.

With some help from home with research, a 2nd grader named Sashi created a book called Heroes. Click each of the photos here to see an enlargement.

* Never heard of a verbivore? Well, carnivores eat meat, herbivores eat plants, and verbivores devour words. It’s a term coined by the word-loving author and columnist Richard Lederer and the name of his web site.