And we're baaaack! To school!

Hello, everyone!  Summer has been – and is still pretty much still here weatherwise (yes, sir – thanks to the Danish weather gods, this seems to have been the best summer since I arrived here in 1998!) – but the school holidays have zipped past and my kids started back yesterday.  Which means that a) the pesky lunchboxes are out on the loose again and b) it’s time to get covering textbooks…

In Denmark the bookshops are stocked to the gunnels right now with rolls of special bogbind (‘bookpaper’).  Don’t be fooled!  Yes, yes, it looks cute and/or cool.  But give this stuff a hard stare and it will disintegrate before your very eyes!  And will be falling off the book by the end of the first schoolday…  Forgive the pun, but it’s paperthin.  So save your Danish crowns and use normal giftwrap or brown paper.  Now, for some reason, the Danes have a bad habit of taping the covering directly onto the book (we even got a message from the school about it last year).  Which, of course, means that it makes a right mess when it’s ripped off at the end of the schoolyear.  So here’s how we cover books in Scotland, as taught to me by my Dear Dad.  (He always covered our books with offcuts of wallpaper – the Navy Seal of bookcovers!)

DS12 brought home this book yesterday – “Allez Hop!” – he’s in 7th grade and is starting French this year (the choice was either French or German).  So let’s get started!  Cut a piece of paper considerably larger than your book.

Fold in the sides to make a dust jacket.

Cut diagonally from the spine down to the edge of the paper.

Fold in the cut edges. 

Tape the edges to each other – but don’t tape onto the actual book!

Not perfect, but the job is done.  “Værsgo’!”  Or should I say “Voilà!”?

Have a great (school)day!

Diane 🙂