the great 3-hour book cover project

I have a friend who teaches third grade, in whose class I have done several art lessons this year. A week or so before our last art session, he asked me if I would teach his students how to make better covers for the books they wrote because the ones they had done were very boring. He asked for a lesson that addressed design, lettering, etc. So here's the result, from yesterday. This was one 3-hour session:

These are the book covers they started with:

This is "roughly" the lesson I gave, with the books I used for samples of exciting, interesting covers. I talked about the layout of each one of these, pointing out how the lettering was done, and how the illustrations and title were placed on the cover:

As they worked, I made some design suggestions. Some of the students had a very hard time with arrangement, with titles smooshed against the top of the page and illustrations along the bottom, so I referred to the books I had brought with me, showing how the titles and illustrations seemed to "go together" rather than be separate from each other. I suggested simplicity, leaving out drawings of complete people (too small on the page) and trying to hone in on something important. Mostly, they were to try to make their book cover interesting so that it would invite someone to want to read their book.

They worked on folded white construction paper, so that when their work was done, we could just slip the whole thing over their book, turning their old book cover into a title page. When everyone was finished, I had them do a little writing about the activity; I asked them to tell what a book cover needs, what they did to make theirs interesting, and then to look up at the "new" wall and tell whose book they might like to read.

I think they did a great job, considering they had only three hours! Their teacher was happy, and so were they!
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