Making a Mem Book

Tom and I are on a roll with our book-making. We created our own accordion books, based on Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord's instructions from her website. She has heaps of other ideas for making your own books - the photos of her book-making workshops are very inspiring.

As it's Book Week, we had to look at one of Mem Fox's books. But which one to choose? What to say about it that hasn’t already been said? So this is a brief list, my best attempt at conveying to you why we love this book, “The Magic Hat.”

- A magic hat – who wouldn’t want one?
- It’s funny – people changing into animals – hilarious!
- The anticipation – wait for it, wait for it – which animal will it be? Can
we guess the rhyme? Do we have any clues from the picture?
- The illustrations are joyful watercolours, with lots of detail by Tricia Tusa
- And the rhyme is wonderful -

Oh, the magic hat, the magic hat!
It moved like this, it moved like that!
It spun through the air and over a road
And sat on the head of a warty old …. Toad!

We used watercolour paints and had a go at painting the hat, the people and the wizard. Imitating the style of the illustrator gave us an appreciation into the correlation between the text and the pictures - you start to notice all the clues in the pictures which hint at the text on the next page. The magic blue hat with its ability to spin through the air was a perfect choice to illustrate our accordian books - which stretched out to accommodate the dancing antics of the hat!