Mini Books
After reading this post on the Artful Parent about recycled homemade books I was a little obsessed with the idea of making some, but I wanted to start with something simple. I kept thinking about Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord’s comment about being inspired when she recycled the tab from her teabag. Well it’s summer, so we’ve been drinking lots of iced tea, much of it made from the cheapo tea bags that each come in their own little envelope. I’ve been recycling them, but its such a lot of paper. So I started thinking about them in terms of books, they fold up and it seemed like it would be a good fit, but I couldn’t come up with the right concept. They’re not very big, so it would have to be a very short story. The outside is printed, so not much of a cover. And then this post on Filth Wizardry popped into my head. And so, the mini book was conceived.
I took two tea bags and glued them back to back for a blank canvas. (I tried painting over the printing but it didn’t work very well). Then I wrote “cat” on the little flap on the outside. On the inside I drew a little picture of a cat and wrote the word again. So simple! My first thought was to write a bunch of easy sight words (cat, sat, hat, bat….) but when Fiona saw it she had her own plan and we quickly made one with each of our names and the names of several of her stuffed animals (I had to dig through the recycling to find enough teabags and it was totally worth it). Since we go through 4 or so teabags a day we should be able to have a few new books each day. I still think I’ll work on some easy words, but Fiona can read or “read” the ones we’ve made so far.