Text: Super Pop-up Reports for American History by Susan Kapuscinski. Scholastic. ISBN: 0-590-58101-5. $12.95.

This professional book is written with clarity and excellent examples for group teaching. If a teacher wishes to teach a group of teachers or a classroom of students, her directions are clear and easy to follow. The projects stemming from this one book are tremendous. A teacher can experiment and have fun learning the technical aspect of reading and following directions.

I plan to use it to create unit reports and book reports. Since I teach high school, the report section on each page will be revised to meet student knowledge and sophistication.

Her instructional book presents pop-up books on Native Americans, Explorers, Colonial America, Revolutionary War, Pioneers, The Underground Railroad, The Civil War, Immigration. Teachers in other disciplines could use themes from their own textbooks to create marvelous pop-up books.

I have worked with pop-ups in the high school for many years. My Advanced Placement students created children’s pop-up books, which were wonderful. They gave them as gifts to siblings and shared them with the pre-K teachers at our school.

One year we did a self-esteem building unit and all of my students made a different pop-up card for each child’s birthday each month and wrote various styles of original poetic verse inside. We celebrated birthdays each month. That was delightful and the feedback was great.

I created a notebook timeline, which I presented at the Florida Council of Teachers of English convention in Tampa where I handed out the book and showed some of the handy work of students and professionals in the pop-up field.

Any teacher willing to try a new challenge should definitely prepare for this one. When a product is finished the students are so excited to share, but they can’t believe they engineered a product such as this and learned not only the unit material, but also how to read directions and how to work in teams.

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Mary Ann Beggs

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