For our Cool After School program last week we made invisible ink and then made our own notebooks!
Drawing inspiration (again!) from the book, Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions You Can Build Yourself, we experimented with two different invisible inks: milk, and lemon juice.
Here are a couple of examples.
The first was written in milk, and the second was written in lemon juice.
As you can see, the inks appear different. The consensus was that, at least at the concentrations we were using for our experiment, lemon juice made the better ink.
The first is a message, which reads: “I love you (unclear) Nic, Nash & Mom.”
The second is a scene of a snowman, with snow falling around him.
Then we made our own notebooks. First we created a signature, or set of pages, by folding an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper, first vertically and then horizontally. The cover was cut from a brown paper grocery bag and folded in half. Then we punched two holes near the fold and hooked a rubber band up from the back side and over the top and bottom end of a twig to form a very cool binding.
I learned this binding from the book, Making Books that Fly, Fold, Wrap, Hide, Pop Up, Twist & Turn: Books for Kids to Make, by Gwen Diehn. You can also find a great online tutorial.
The kids were really excited about both projects. Here are some of their notebooks.
