Elementary Studio Lesson
Curriculum Building with
Handmade Books
With today’s emphasis on preparing students for standardized testing, it can be daunting for
classroom teachers to find and justify
time for the arts within the academic
curriculum. Handmade books, however, offer a creative and academically
enriching solution to this dilemma.
Sue Colozzi
Students can make construction
paper booklets that can be easily
adapted to different subjects, taking the form of notebooks, diaries, or
learning journals. The booklets inspire
and motivate students to want to fill
their interiors with original writing
and can be constructed from basic
materials found in the classroom.
Reading Curriculum
As an alternative to answering work-sheets of content questions for our
required reading curriculum, I had
students make books that followed
the theme in the novels we were reading. The form of the books allowed
students to meet the literary goals
of the units, such as sequencing and
