Brave New World Bookmarks

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. ;)

BookMARKS from BookPAGES

I first discovered Etsy when I read The Hunger Games about three years ago. I geeked out over the tons of unique items created by readers – there were even handcrafted mockingjay pins and pendants (remember folks, this was before the third book was even published). At any rate, in my browsing I stumbled upon this idea and instantly fell in love:

Sadly, the Etsy shop that originally sold these bookmarks no longer exists - I had to scrounge around Pinterest to find the image. Additionally the user who created the stamp used for these bookmarks is actually 'on vacation' according to Etsy, so 0 for 2 there. However, the inspiration lives on!

At the time of my discovery, I was in my second year of teaching tenth and eleventh grade English. My school's curriculum included outside-of-class reading, so my students were all assigned a book each quarter that we discussed every few weeks, culminating in book analyses (the grading of which were the bane of my existence!). Anyway, I thought that this would be a great idea for an end-of-the-year present for my kids, using the apparent favorites of the past year. Winners for my tenth graders were A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding; for my eleventh graders it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I kept my eye out for the next few weeks and picked up copies of each of these books from thrift stores and used bookshops. Sure, Amazon would have been easier, but I'm thrifty like that. ;) I’m also lucky, because my mom is a stamper, meaning I had a large collection of stamps to look over and choose from for embellishing the bookmarks. It was fun figuring out an iconic image for each book from the stamps available – Raisin was easy because my mom had a sunshine stamp. We also lucked out with LOTF, since she had a conch shell stamp (how PERFECT is that?). Gatsby and Frankenstein were a bit trickier, but I finally settled on an artsy portrait stamp that reminded me of the twenties for Gatsby and a stark outline of a tree for Frankenstein.

NOTE: These are pictures of leftover bookmarks, which is why I don't have a photo of any Raisin ones - they were all snapped up pretty quickly, as were the Frankenstein ones (only one left!).

My books’ pages were great – they had the title of the novel centered at the top of each page, which was a fun detail for the bookmark. I tried to choose pages that had keywords on them, like character names. Frankenstein was the best – gothic mood words abound in that book – every page had words like “tortured soul,” “gloom,” “dismal,” “terror,” etc. Loved it. :P The assembly steps were simple – chop the page down to size, round the corners (I have a pretty nifty corner rounder punch), add the stamp, laminate, and trim. I didn’t add the ribbon tassel to my bookmarks – too much hassle, and in my experience, tasseled bookmarks are the least practical; also, half of these were for teen boys, so I figured I doubled their odds of survival and potential use by nixing the tassels!

I did adhere a little note to the back of each before I laminated them, though. Yes, the majority of my kids were student athletes. ;) I laid the bookmarks out on a table in the back of the room and allowed students to go back and choose their own bookmarks based on their book preference. And there you have it, sweet, simple, English-y gifts that are easy to mass-produce, yet unique to each class and student.