This is probably one of the most important posts of the lot it deals with the books you make yourself! We have a bunch of different books in out house that were made by me....
Music Books- These books collect the songs poems and rhymes that we enjoy. I got some from TV; watching playschool and The Wiggles etc, some from books that we love and included some from Kindy. I just printed them out on the computer or even wrote them by hand in the good old days and ten stuck them in. I either illustrated them myself or found pictures from magazines.
In the first music book I did I also included a column for pictures of musical instruments so that they were a part of our every day life- neither Les nor I play an instrument and we aren't big on attending or watching many things where the kids might be exposed to musical instruments, so I figured the pictures were a good way of getting them in there.
Gymbaroo Books. Both Kieran and Merenia attended Gymbaroo which if you can get to it (we can't anymore) I highly recommend. Each term there was a theme and each week there was a word that related to that theme. We got the word and a picture of it to take home and stick in our books. The method changed over time but in the start you used the book a little like a flash card flashing the word and then the picture. My kids loved their Gymbaroo books, so much so that when we extended what they were doing at Gymbaroo with our own words and when were in Nowra and couldn't go we made up our own themes and did the words and pictures for them.
Readers. Some books that we have I made for Kieran who was already starting to read before he was 3 years old. These books have simple sentences in the with the regularly used words on subjects pertinent to our family. One of them started out with just one word and the picture and then the sentence got added around the word as Kieran got better and better. Just as a side note I never 'taught' Kieran to read. We read to him practically everyday from birth and he developed his own passion for reading which I simply facilitated and built on.
Informative. We have some homemade books which I made simply to help the kids understand things that were happening around them. This included a book on F3B which is a type of modeling contest. And another on the butterfly life cycle which was done with pictures of the Monarch butterflies that we had on our own swan plants. And one that had photos of family members who lived back in New Zealand.
These pages are from the F3B Book...
"Rememorative". Finally we have books that were made to remember the things that we have done. Holidays, zoo trips, gala days and such... occasions where I had too many photos to just do a page in their scrapbook. These were the days before scrapbooking was an 'industry' in New Zealand and it was just something I did because I wanted to, not realising that in the states there was a growing culture and business of scrapbooking.... a mini album wasn't in my vocabulary.
This was a summer Holiday to the Christchurch for Christmas and the Nationals in Carterton...
I took K and M to the Zoo and we had a bunch of clues to solve to do a treasure hunt around the zoo....
This is a page from "When we lived in Australia"...
This is from our big holiday that we went on in Australia
(I was pregnant with Merenia at the time)...
(I was pregnant with Merenia at the time)...
In the beginning I either used exercise books or I used light card, I did them in my own writing with a vivid and bound the books myself with masking tape. After we got a computer I printed the pages onto card adding the photos etc later and when I discovered how cheap it was I started to get the books spiral bound at the local stationery shop. Sometimes I covered the cover in clear duraseal or used a sheet of transparency. A cheaper and easier alternative was to just cover the spine and corners with duraseal (I used to do this to ALL our books). Some times I just left them as is, especially the 'readers' which were never meant to last, although they have quite well indeed.
What I didn't do, but will hopefully do with Will, was to write some stories together and have the kids illustrate them for us, that will be cool.
1 comment:
I love all your home made books - they are waaay cool! I made my first book when I was about 8 and my mum has it tucked away somewhere, it was a fictional story with a main character called Mr Mad I think. When I got to Teacher's College I made some more books, my bestest ever being a book about my pet lamb called Rambo. I gave it to my mum for Christmas the year that Rambo died and my mum howled over it. Maybe that put me off writing because I don't think I've made a book since then. You have inspired me though and I'm going to get back into it. I had my 3 year old niece to stay over the hols and she looked through my scrapbooking albums (which have lots of picts of her in them) over and over and over. She loved them! I think I'll make her a book about her adventures with her aunties for Christmas.
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