I really enjoyed publishing a holiday-themed book during my first year of teaching. However, after some reflection, I realized that publishing a book in November, did not really accurately display my students' growth in first grade. November is still early on in the school year and I wanted the published book to be a treasured memory and display of my students' growth and accomplishments in the school year. So during my second year of teaching, I decided to create our published book in May, to really show off my students' writing.
Our class had been spending a lot of time talking about a caring community and working together and helping others, so I thought it would be a good idea to create a book surrounding that theme. I had the students come up with different scenarios they might see in the real world in which someone might be in need of some help. After we brainstormed some scenarios, I divided the students into partners. Each set of partners was assigned a scenario, and together, they had to decide on a solution of how they were going to help the person in need.
Like the Turkeys in Disguise book, each student was given their one page for writing and one page for illustration. One person in the partnership was in charge of writing the scenario and ending it with "What would you do?" and drawing the illustration to go with it. The partner was in charge of writing the solution and drawing the illustration. However, there was one little catch with the illustrations. Since the scenario and solution go together, the partners had to work together to create very similar illustrations so that they would go together too. For example, if the person drawing the illustration page for the scenario drew a picture of a girl with black hair and a red dress, the person drawing the illustration for the solution page had to make sure to also draw a girl with the exact same appearance.
This book displayed a true work of collaboration and partnership. Once again, I had my photographer friend come and take pictures of the students with their page. We also made a live recording of us reading our book. Watch the recording of our book below and see if you can spot all the similarities! What would you do if you were in these scenarios?