I am an avid teacher blog follower and get a lot of great ideas from the various blogs I follow. One of these blogs directed my attention to this free school publishing program. Your class creates a book, you send it to the company, and they publish it into a hardcover copy book for free! Parents are also allowed and encouraged to buy the book to be read and shared with family and friends.
When I found out about this program, I knew I had to give it a try! It was around October when this idea came up so I thought it would be great if my class created a November themed book. After some discussion and brainstorming, we decided to create a book called "Turkeys in Disguise". The class spent three full consecutive days going through the entire writing process to get our book created. We spent a day brainstorming different disguises for our turkeys, what the turkey in disguise will be doing when the cook arrives, and why the disguise is a good one. Then each student was assigned a disguise and had to write their rough draft for their page in the book. After writing our rough drafts, we did some editing, playing close attention to correct capitalization and punctuation. Finally on the third day, we were able to create our final draft. Creating our final draft was the most difficult for some students because the publishing company required us to use black ink for our writing and markers for our illustrations. This means that no mistakes could be made so students had to be extra careful.
All our hard work paid off! Two weeks later, our hardcover books arrived! The students LOVED them! A generous parent had bought extra books for the classroom which also allowed us to donate a book to our school library for others to read.
Our time with our class published book wasn't finished. I had a photographer friend of mine come and take pictures of the students with their page in the book. I printed the pictures out and gave them to the parents as memorabilia. We also created an video of the kids reading their page in the book. Watch the video below!