Making Books with children
Making big or small books with children is not a novel idea; in fact, all you need to know about this is included in the wonderful series of books listed at the end of this short post, with some new ideas which include digital storybooks.
Children will love making various types of books whether they can write or are still at the pre-writing stage. Some objectives:
- To retell and illustrate a favourite story or fairy tale, e.g. Cinderella, or other favourite
- To share information from a science lesson or series of lessons – for example, a book about snow, a book about saving water
- To copy and illustrate the lines of a poem and chant or song they learnt recently
- To showcase their own imaginative stories, dialogues and poems or rhymes
Even if they cannot write yet, they can always dictate their story to their teacher and by the process of watching the written word emerge on the page or by looking at it afterwards, they begin their road to reading.
The children will be using their fine motor skills for cutting round shapes, colouring in pictures, gluing shapes in place, as well as their artistic abilities and imaginative, creative thinking; there is value across many levels, language development and literacy being of prime importance.
How to do it
1. Decide on the type of book; this can be…
- Simple shape book
- A pop up book
- A three-folded book
- An accordion shaped book
- A flap book
- A wheel book
2. Decide whether your pupils will be making
- one big size book for the whole class
- smaller group versions
- an individual book which they can take home
3. Find and bring materials to class
- coloured thick paper or cardboard
- glue
- colouring materials
- magazine pictures
- stickers
- glitter
- rounded scissors
- other materials, e.g. pieces of fabric, dried flowers, very small objects, etc..
How?
With children who are still at the pre-writing stage
- you can ask them to tell you their story and you can write it for them
- you can give them the words written on card or paper slips and guide them to glue them in the right place and order
With early writers, you can help them by asking them to
- trace words or even whole phrases
- fill in some words or phrases in gaps you have created and later copy them into their book
- copy a familiar story or fairy tale into a book they have made
More independent writers can
- write their own stories in rough first and then copy onto the book after the teacher has helped ‘fix’ any mistakes
- write their own poems or other type of text – song lyrics, rap or short descriptive paragraphs
Digital Story books
Online tools like Storybird can make the children’s efforts look very smart and professional and I am very fond of those as well, but I also believe that making their own hand made versions has got great educational value for the children.
After the children have finished, you can leave their book on the server, go for the paid version if you want to print their book, or if you want to do it for free, you screen capture all the pages and print them as images.
Here are some examples of Storybirds….
Nana Can I Have A… on Storybird
My Heart Hurts When… on Storybird
Mixbook is another great site which I learned from Natasa Bozic Grojic’ s blogpost and here is the story she made with her son, “The Boy who listened”
But even a simple powerpoint slide show story can be great! Here is one I made with my nephew when he was about 5 years old using summer snapshots on the beach.
Picture this: A teacher is holding up a big book.
A group of children is gathered round her looking at the illustrations, listening to a story, acting out parts of it, involved in the telling and retelling, noticing small details, repeating new words, learning new concepts.
Getting children to develop a love for books means spending time with books, reading them and making them. Whether you are teaching children in their mother tongue or in a foreign language, you will notice the great boost to language acquisition in the children.
Making their own books is the next logical step and early literacy teachers can apply everything they know to these enjoyable and memorable to children reading and early (or later) writing activities.
Resources
4. Make Books with Children Series: Here you can find a great range of books with ideas for making books with your classses. You may want to begin with the Making Books with Children.
- For Pop up books, you can visit here to watch and show the children short little movies of how Dave Carter, an author of popup books made some of his pop ups and the same page leads to some wonderful shapes in pdf format that you can copy and print out for your pupils to make their own books.
- Free Shape Books where you can find shapes to print
- ThinkQuest – A wonderful site where you can find illustrated instructions for many types of book shapes
A huge thank you goes to Marisa Constantinides for sharing this wonderful post with us! Please leave your comments for Marisa below….
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This is a great post. I am a children’s book author and we did a program for a local library helping kids to realize that even their small stories are book-worthy. It instills confidence and self-esteem in them. Tara Michener http://www.taramichener.com
Such great resources! Thanks for all f the ideas!
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