Make Your Own Picture Book Craft Day

 

Our library team did a Make Your Own Picture Book craft day for Picture Book Month. Actually, because it was Picture Book Month, whenever we had classes come into the library for the month of November, our team asked the students to make picture books. We used dye cut shapes, foam alphabet letters, old stamps that we had lying around, ribbon, and a whole slew of other materials we had in the storage room. This was an awesomely successful craft day. Why? Mostly because I think we finally found a good day to run these types of programs.

Saturdays are tough at our location because we have to compete with the community center, which offers swimming and martial arts during the same time slots slated for children's programming at our library. We're also competing with grocery shopping time. Wednesday evenings, on the other hand, work a lot better. Parents have probably already come home and have eaten dinner with their kids, after which they can then enjoy a nice evening at the library, either taking out books, or participating in a crafty program! Woohoo!

To tell the truth, I was a little worried that our program wouldn't have a lot of participants because the weather was against us that night. We had a snow storm! Gasp! But, it all worked out in the end because I think people living close by wanted something to do, since they were trapped by snow and traffic (mostly the latter!), and because of...magic! Heh heh!

Program Specs:
-Wednesday evening from 5:30pm to 6:30pm
-ages 5Y to 10Y
-free drop-in program

This was the sample picture book I made to show the kids what kinds of things they can do with their picture books. The pop-up templates used are from Robert Sabuda's awesome pop-up tutorial page.

A lot of the kids wanted to incorporate pop-ups into their picture books, but some were more interested in making their own pictures. Below are pics of some of the awesome stuff our participants made.What an amazing group, right?