Teachers receive many booklets with reproducible student pages inside. It is easy to recognize this type of teacher material because it looks just like a student workbook but may have 3 holes punched in it. The idea is to have the teacher remove the pages when needed, make copies for students, then start a materials binder that will hold the student worksheet until the teacher needs to copy it again.

Teachers rarely remove the pages because the pages do not pull out easily. The pages tear. The pages get mangled when a person tries to oh-so-carefully remove them along the handy perforation the book publisher provides. Instead, TheRoomMom teachers will push the entire book flat on the copy machine while the copy machine (who think it is smarter than you are) reorients the page, so it copies landscape rather than portrait, and you get a copy of a half a page and a good shot of your arm and watchband.

I found a solution. An instructor at a professional development class I attended this summer told me to put the book that you want to separate in the freezer for several hours. When you pull the book out of the freezer, bend the pages back, and the glue will crack. Voila. You can separate all pages and reassemble in a binder.

I apologize to my non-educator followers who might not find today’s post useful. On the other hand, if you have been desperate to find a way to cleanly remove pages from the heavy glue binding in a book, this might just be the tip that will change your world.