Getting Technological

Although we have been doing lots of Mantle stuff, I haven't much to say. This week we have been working on our calendar art. I incorporated it into our Mantle as the class were given a choice of four options for this years calendar art. And they chose watercolour (yes, watercolour, again!) kina shells with black vivid for the outlines, inspired by something I saw on pinterest. What was cool about this was that they said they thought it would be nice to use kina shells as the subject of their paintings as it links to our Inquiry. So while I had some people working on their books, others were completing their calendars, and we pretended we had an extra little commission from the local primary school to paint some beautiful artworks for a fundraiser. The paintings came out pretty good, I reckon!
The technological bit has been trial and error, working out page numbering, putting text on the right pages in the right places, and gluing the book pages onto big sheets in the correct order so that they can be cut and stitched together and actually be in the right places! Long sentence, I know, sorry.
It has been a challenge, for me and for them. Some have added in extra bits like "The End" or patterned pages so that it all works out right. We also had to include a page with publishing details, and a pretend ISBN as we had discussed this earlier. We are getting there.
I had a bit of a dilemma though. They all want a copy of their books, we need to send one of each to Camellia from EMR and probably one of each for the school library (that's all in the real world), but realistically, that's a massive amount of printing ink and paper. The books are only A5 size, but printed back to back in full colour on A3 sheets is quite alot when you've got that many to do.
At the end of today, with most of the class at Sports Academy or singing, and my email inbox full of scanned and emailed illustrations ready to add text to, I had an idea. 
I took my original book that I finished all by myself because I don't practise Thinking Interdependently, and the remaining children, and off we went to the resource room where we tried reducing it down to half that size again. Printed on A4 uses way less ink and paper. The bell had gone and this group were so keen to see the outcome that they stayed until it had printed! And the result is an adorable weeny book.
Now for the cover designs!

It's like a puzzle, what page goes where?!!

Brodie adds the text to her groups book.

Jessica checks that the spelling and grammar are correct.

Ellie's calendar art. She is way talented!

Caitlin's art

Charise's art, love the paua!