Crafts Made from Books that Kids Can Make

April is School Library Month and National Librarian Day is celebrated on April 16, so I thought it would be fun to look at some crafts made with books and book pages. (Your librarian will want to suggest you only do this with damaged books, or old books from the thrift store, I’m sure.)

First, if you have whole books you want to craft with, you can make a cute monster out of a book with this tutorial from DIY N Crafts.

Or try this super cute hedgehog from Pink Stripey Socks. This one is a little smaller so kids might actually be willing to fold the pages long enough to finish it. But these kids of crafts are great for downtime or when you’re watching a movie at home.

This elephant from It’s All Kids Play is also done in a faster way that I think kids could make it through in order to finish it. You can also break the folding up into multiple sessions if you need to. And of course you can use this same idea to make all kinds of animals, so each child can decide what they want to make if you’re doing it with multiple kids or a classroom.

What if you’re working with a bunch of kids but don’t want to have to gather a bunch of books to craft with? There are plenty of crafts you can make with single book pages or a smaller quantity of pages than a whole book.

Book page bookmarks are super simple to make but also really cute. These instructions from Thrifty Fun use a gift tag as the template and to make the bookmark stronger, but you could make them different shapes and just use several layers of page or laminate them if you have a laminator to make them stronger.

These cute shape penguins from DIY Thought were actually made with newspaper, but you could use book pages as well and make different animals if you don’t want penguins (these could be bookmarks, too). And these folded paper stars are shown made with kraft paper, but the original inspiration, which you’ll see in the post at All Things Paper, was made out of book pages.

I also love these sweet pinwheels from Maya Smart made out of book pages, or your can make little paper bows out of book pages like these from Dukes and Duchesses. Turn the leftovers into a book page bunting like this one from Laura Radniecki to decorate the classroom and you’ll be all set for any book-related celebrations.

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

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