Student Produced Books

Second, the child decides or is directed to begin collecting their thoughts. They can write their ideas down in short sentences, outlines, or drawn circles. This step is called prewriting.

Third, the student actually begins writing the rough draft of their book. This will be on paper that can be edited and not cause tears.

Fourth, the editing takes place. The student should be taught and encouraged to edit their own papers, but before the final write, the teacher should also edit.

Fifth, after determining the paper that will be used in the book, how much writing will go on each page, and where the illustrations will appear, the student writes his final copy making sure that he corrects all the edits.

Sixth, the student should illustrate his book. I would suggest drawing the picture on another sheet and gluing in the finished product unless an illustration is being used from a coloring book or pattern.

Seventh, the book is bound. There are many avenues on how this can be done. We have used staples (my least favorite), hole punch and thread tied ends, combs, sewed books, and glued ends.

Autumn's Blue Pig, Blue Pig, What Do You See? book (Grade 1)

(Cover Page - hole punched and yarn ends)

(Sample page of internal pages)

>>>On this book, we used simple writing paper that was lined for the cover page. The inside pages I made using coloring book pages of animals copied and pasted to a blank white page with a section of lined paper glued to the bottom. I copied those to make them clean for Autumn's use. This book is her re-write of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?<<<

Autumn's My Neighborhood book (Grade 2)

In this book, we used a printout sheet for the pages. The first page was her introduction page. The second page sample shows how the rest of the pages were done. We went around town taking her picture in front of various places. Those we used for her illustrations. She then wrote one sentence about each place. Most of the sentences were similar. They would read as, "My town has a bank" for example. I laminated all of the pages, including two yellow cardstock sheets with one titled My Town by Autumn Monroe. In laminating, I put the front and back of pages together, and the lamination kept them as one turnable page. We then had this one comb bound.

Ashlee's Plant Journal book (Grade 6)

(Cover page and sample of one type of page in book)

(Sample page of the most common type of pages found in this book)

In this book, forms were used that we found in a unit study book. These would be very easy to recreate yourself. There were pages in this book where leaves, flowers, etc. were examined by dissecting or by looking through magnifying glasses. These findings were recorded. Most of the pages were reports and drawings of flowers that were found our some of our nature walks. The drawings and reports is student created. This book was hole punched and put into a thin 3-ring notebook.