Sometimes the kids come up with the best unschooling moments. This month we had an impromptu unit study--bookmaking! It started when the three younger kids were all playing together, imagining that they were elves attending elven school. They had discovered an old book of Sara Teasdale's poems, which read to them like magic spells. So they started looking for old poetry books to be their "spell books." Of course I didn't want them ruining my antique books, so I suggested we make homemade books, in which they could copy whatever poems they liked.

So we checked out several books from the library on bookmaking, a few of which are about the history or fictional stories of bookmaking. We spent some read-aloud time in these stories. We took two whole days to make our homemade books--I already had the supplies on hand. We cut covers from bookboard, sewed some pages together (Shannon took the extra step of antiqueing her pages with tea leaves), decorated the covers and put them all together. Shannon has since printed out her favorite poems by Sara Teasdale in a medieval-style font and glued them into her book, along with various clip art pictures of dragons and other fantasy creatures. It was great fun!