How to Make a Pop Up Book {With Your 5 Year Old}

Today’s book list comes with a twist! If you’ve ever wondered how to make a pop up book, you are in for a treat. Art and design superstar Ana of Babble Dabble Do and I are starting a BOOK ART collaboration and our first project is pop-up books.

Since Ana is all about design and I am all about books and reading, it seemed natural that our first project be a homemade book. Writing their own stories is a wonderful literacy activity for kids.

Ana designed the project and you can find her step by step instructions at Babble Dabble Do. After (or before) you make these pop-up books with your kids — and if I can do it, you can too — you will want to read a few “engineered paper” books with your kids. This is Monday after all, so I must include a book list, but you’ll have to head over to Ana’s blog to get the rest of the list!

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Making a Pop Up Book with Your Kid

I put together two blank pop up books for my 5 year old (aka New Kid) ahead of time. He’s not too much into crafting these days, but he does like storytelling and I wanted that to be the focus for him.

Get the step by step instructions —> Babble Dabble Do.

The first book he worked on was a Star Wars book. These days he is enamored with Star Wars, and I fully admit that working on this book craft with him was much needed change of pace from reading the gazillion and one Star Wars easy readers that he insists on checking out of the library every week.

New Kid is not exactly an artistic prodigy but that’s not really important, is it? He had fun scribbling out a few of his favorite Star Wars icons for the pop up pictures and labelled them. He’s practicing sounding out words so I only helped him when he asked. His teachers told me not to worry about exact spelling.

The second book we made was the one you see in the very top photo. We have been reciting Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky every night and New Kid is a little obsessed with what happens to the Jubjub Bird and the Bandersnatch so I suggested he write his own poem. By the time we started the second book he was exhausted from handwriting so I wrote the words he dictated. It’s quite the poem!

New Kid has been reading and re-reading his pop-up books. He is so proud of them!

This was a fun project for us, and a great way to build literacy and storytelling skills, as well as show how writing is fun and not a worksheet-oriented chore. I never would have done it had it not been for the gentle shove from Ana, so I’m quite grateful to her for the special time my son and I had together. While you’re over at Babble Dabble Do, be sure to poke around because she has some amazingly wonderful art projects that you can do at home, although I think my all time favorite project of hers is this constellation geoboard.

Pop up Book List

Be sure to pop (pun) over to Ana’s blog to see my additional three recommendations for pop-up books you and your kids will enjoy. (Covers and titles are affiliate links.)

Open This Little Book is not exactly a pop-up. Rather it’s a book within a book within a book within a book… well, you get the idea. As a group of animals read stories about other creatures reading stories, the books grow smaller and smaller until there is simply no room left and they must start all over again.

Popville is a rather amazing little book from the French team, Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud. The book begins with a single pop-up building. On each subsequent page more buildings, trees, electric poles, and other trappings of civilization are added and the end result is a lovely little town. What’s unusual in this pop-up is that the pages are all cut out, so the original building on the opening page remains part of the ever growing community. The authors also have a forest themed book and an ocean book that will be released later this year.

My bird loving sons adore Birds of a Feather. It’s a very, very large book and although each page contains primarily lift the flaps rather than true pop-ups, the oversized nature of the book makes you feel as if the birds are flying up at you. My sons’ favorite spread is one with eggs in relative sizes, which when lifted reveal pop-ups of the bird that would hatch from it.

Have you ever made pop up books or cards with your kids? Is this a project they would enjoy? 

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