mix up book

my son has a book where the pages are split and part of the sentence is on each section.   he got his from the library's damaged and needs to go sale.  

 it's really damaged, as you can see.   he loves this book though.   he has actually loved it to death and now i have to figure out how to bring it back to life.

in the meantime, i thought it would be fun to make our own.

here's my theory on it.   

take this paper.

make several copies.

let everyone have a couple.

explain what your doing and that they have to keep things within the gray dotted lines so they match up with the next persons pictures.

have them draw themselves or monsters, aliens, animals, book characters, who or what ever they want.   you could set a theme if you want too.   the outline is there so they have to keep with the outline so everything matches up.   you could do the same thing with just dots at the cut marks and they have to match the top and bottom of their head bodies to the dots so they line up with the next one.   i have a 3 year old so we are going with the simple version.

on the other side, they write their sentence or sentences depending on how old they are.  you will need to keep them short and give them some kind of outline or they won't match story wise.   you can see in the example, it says a name on the first section, then two things they are doing that matches the picture drawn.   

example -

laura = head

eats 3 scoops of ice cream = body holding ice cream

the dog likes it too = a dog at her feet licking the ice cream she drops.

fold your paper in half.   do not cut them yet.   it will make your life that much harder and that much harder to match up and glue your book together.  

now, you need to make a decision.  do you want to punch holes or sew or just glue.   if you want to punch holes, do that before you glue.   it's going to be hard to do it after you glue everything together. 

glue back to front into a book like this -

as long as the top and bottom of the paper matches, the cut lines should match up.   i would use glue sticks so it isn't as wet.   you could also glue different pieces of colored paper in between the book pages to make them more stable and make it easier to match the right ones together.   let the colored paper stick out around the edge a little.   you can see in the real book that the words are all on a different color background so they match when they are in the right order.

after your all glued and dried, you can sew across the binding or run yarn through the holes if you punched some.   if you might want to add to it later, i think punching holes is the way to go.

we are actually going to do ours for a conference activity.   but they would be fun for scouts, school, family home evening, etc., yada, whatever . . . . you could do systems in the body, like skin, muscles, bones, nervous system digestive system etc.   you could do a progression of clothing styles through the ages, or traditional clothing from various countries.   you could simply do strengths of each member of the family to see how you compliment each other in building your family.   just a few thoughts.

i'll post pics after we are done with ours.   i hope you have fun with it.