What is a book? What is a map?

This is work from an art lesson I did with my third grade dyad kids. The kids made altered books with personal maps. Since they have been learning how to use maps, I showed them some unusual maps from a book called You Are Here: Personal Maps and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon.

One is below; it's a Japanese illustration of human internal organs and shows lots of little workers doing their various body jobs. Surrounding the body is text on the subject of how to eat to stay healthy.

Here is a kid wearing his in-progress altered book over his face.

This project raises questions about what a book is and what a map is, and what's behind our values around using books in an unconventional way. It's a very big deal to the kids to fold the pages of a book, and I love hearing their ideas about that.

The assistant librarian at a different school saw me doing a similar project and said, "Oh, I don't know what Mr. K would say about this." Mr. K is the wonderful school librarian. Later that day I showed him the book project, and he said he was thinking about writing a grant for some kind of art installation in the hall, and that our project might be good for that. 

This project works as a kind of scrapbook for the kids. They can fill the book with personal maps about trips they have taken, subjects or activities that are meaningful to them, things they would like to do someday. The student above let us know about a trip she took at a very important transition time in her life.

I have taught a similar lesson before where the kids wrote poems based on the story in the book. They cut and folded and twisted the pages into a tree. Then they glued the poems onto the endpapers, and wrote words from the book or poem onto leaves on the end of the branches.

Altered books allow so many possibilities for how to represent information, and so much potential for rich conversations with kids.