My kid sees me read a computer screen far more often than he sees me read books printed on paper. And yet his second grade teacher sends home books, not ipads. Aren’t we supposed to model good behavior? I need to have a talk with that teacher!

Or does she needs to have a talk with me?

In order to set a good example, I have gone old school with my kids. My mid year resolution has been, at least once a week, to let them see me read books – the kind printed on paper. Time to turn a page.

Last night, while my boy was finishing “Trumpet of the Swan” (of which he was not particularly impressed), I sat beside him with a copy of “Lettering and Type” by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals.

Interested in dad’s book, he spent the next thirty-beyond-bedtime minutes looking at fonts, talking about the many ways to represent an “A”, and trying his hand at deciphering abstract representations of letters.

While the blog you are presently reading (presumably on a computer screen) started out as a polemic about reading one’s own books in front of kids, the real message here is that elementary school kids are fascinated by fonts.

It makes sense. They have recently mastered their ABC’s, are asked to practice handwriting skills on a daily basis, and have begun to read. For them new fonts are a kind of secret code, art, and play. Moreover, they get tons of opportunity to engage with their newly found knowledge; our advertising-saturated culture provides them with pervasive and real world feed back.

Suddenly the ABC game has a new dimension on road trips. Squirrelly kids at the restaurant can be given a section of the New York Times for a font safari. The marketing department for the lemonade stand sign now requests thirty more wonderful minutes for their project. Bonus.

As we devoured “Lettering and Type”, my boy became particularly fond of one of the book’s exercises. The challenge: make your own font using combinations of these three shapes.

So we made and printed a template, followed by a great fine motor skill exercise that involved scissors and a lot of cutting.

I was uptight about my font family’s consistency; the boy plowed forward like a creative madman. His “Hammerhead C” was far more interesting than my predictably conservative and cleanly-lined C.

We are defined by life stage.

DIY Kids by Ellen and Hulia Lupton, one my favorite activity books, also has a font exercise called wacky letters which might be a little more kid friendly. Here is a video review of the book I made for Dad Labs.

And for the dad who actually wants a little screen time with kid and is ready to help teach keyboarding skills: kids love to play with fonts in word processors. My experience is that a child’s willingness to play (as well as print) far exceeds my patience (and paper budget).

For this blog I experimented with some font design programs, but found them to have a pretty steep learning curve and not suitable for elementary schools kids. Just in case you are totally jazzed to start designing your own fonts, here are they are:

Mac/Windows freeware: FontForge.

Windows shareware: FontCreator

Mac/Windows, $99: Type Tool from FontLab, makers of a more robust program called FontLabStudio ($649). You can get a demo of Type Tool here for free.

Here is a movie about Helvetica which also will be a little dry for your kids but may give you some inspiration.

Helvetica

Regardless of your OS of choice, this graduation speech by Steve Jobs, one part typography, one part why you should drop out of college.

Steve Jobs Graduation Speech

Transcript.

And finally, we have been playing a lot with Google Sketchup in the family (related blog); the seven year old boy can run the program on his own. One can use it to make 3-D letters fairly quickly, an exercise that will help teach perspective, vanishing points and all sorts of other spatial modeling goodness for the plastic brain.