At the end of each semester I give a
little gift to my seniors (non-food, since that's illegal #ThanksMichelleObama). Since my seniors spend a lot of time
outside of class reading an assigned novel (Frankenstein
in the fall, Brave New World in the
spring) and the last few weeks of class completing a multi-genre project on it,
I’ve developed a tradition of giving them bookmarks made from the pages of
their particular book. I’ve posted about this craft before, but I did something
a little different this past spring.
The first steps were business as usual – pulling out pages from my chosen text and trimming them down to size (I always try to center the book’s title at the top).
However, Brave New World stymied me when it came time to choose an accent detail.
Typically I’ve stamped a design of some sort on each bookmark, but I kept
coming up empty with Brave New World.
So, I decided to utilize the key icons of the book (Greek letters indicating
castes) and replicate them on the bookmarks by hand… after looking them up to make
sure I drew them correctly!
After making my ‘key,’ I selected a
few colors and drew each letter in a variety of shades. Since I knew the higher
castes would be more popular (duh!), I allocated them a larger number of bookmarks.
Once I had my bookmarks prepped, I
ran ‘em through the laminator (my favorite thing to do!), cut ‘em out, and then
used my nifty corner-rounder to finish 'em off. Tip: If you’re going to round
corners, wait until after laminating
– that way you only have to do it once. A good corner-rounder will punch
through laminated paper just as well.
Lastly, I added a little sticker label to the back of each bookmark with references that encompassed the scope of the class (‘epic’ refers to Beowulf, the first text we read at the beginning of the semester). And, there you have it! Maybe not as neat as their stamped cousins, but my students didn’t know the difference. ;)
