Learn how to age paper with tea and teach your children how to create old fashioned parchments. You only need tea and paper for this project!
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As part of homeschooling this year, we’ve been reading a lot of the “You Wouldn’t Want to Be/Live Without/Etc” books. They’re FANTASTIC. This week’s book was “You wouldn’t want to live without books.” We learned about the printing press, as well as the history of books, including how clay and animal skins were used to make documents.
I decided that this was a good opportunity to do some different experiments and try to imitate some of these old ways of making paper or books. My kids love writing their own books so I’m going to do the following projects with them:
- Aging paper using tea
- Recycling paper / making paper
- How to bind a book
- Using clay to make a document or write a message.
- How to make a stamp from a potato
- How to make a paperback book
Keep an eye out for each tutorial if you’re interested in this project for homeschool! There’s another book, “You wouldn’t want to live without writing” that might be good to read too as part of a 2 week process.
Other homeschool activities:
- Use stamps to individually stamp out a message on a piece of paper
- Learn how to use a quill pen
- Writing practice: Copying a (short) book like a monk in 9th century Europe
- Make stamps from potatoes and use them to write something out.
- Write a story together, each person adding a sentence to the story.
- Practice editing for each other’s short story.
- Math: Calculate how much you’d charge for a book, how much a publisher would take, and how much you would pay to self publish, etc.
- Visit a bookstore and have each child bring $5-10 to spend on a book
Here’s a video showing our process…
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