Creating Zines is an awesome little activity for any age group!
A zine, pronounced “zeen” (like the end of the word magazine), is a homemade publication. There are no set-in-stone rules for making zines.
zines can be about anything you’re interested in. Really!
there are all kinds of zines including: fanzines (a zine about something or someone you love), cooking zines full of recipes and tips, comic zines, art zines, poetry zines, and personal zines where people write about their daily lives.
the content and appearance of a zine is completely up to the creator
can be as simple or as complicated as you want
The example shown above was made using the prompt “I create…” to illustrate 7 of the Elements and Principles of Design (and one extra independent design), but I have also used this format for my Grade 4 & 5 groups to curate writing and drawings from their Poetry Unit. I taught my students this simple way of folding and cutting for the book’s construction (zines can be put together and bound in many ways) and asked them to use a combination of text and imagery on each page to show off some self-expression and creativity in the spirit of zine-making.
In this lesson, we discussed and came up with some examples for elements and principles such as:
Line
Shape & Form
Space
Colour
Value
Texture
Balance
Movement
Rythym
Contrast
Pattern
Unity
Emphasis
Perspective
Students came up with some really great ideas and I think this quick project could be taken so many fun directions. While we only worked on this for two lessons or so, students could take this larger and collaborate on zine projects. Each student can work on a page of the zine under one common theme, passing it around the class and having a submission for each student as a community project, in which reproductions made by photocopier could be easily shared with families and the school.