How to Create a Class Book for First Grade
There's no question that first graders get excited about anything in which they get to be the center of attention. Putting together a classroom book that contains their photos, artwork and short quotes about family, food, and recess is not only a fun project that gets everyone engaged, but becomes a special memento of childhood for parents and grandparents. Technology makes it easy to perform all the layout on a computer monitor and then print out individual copies, post on the school's website, or disseminate via email.
Things You'll Need
- Word processing software
- Digital camera
- Scanner
- Printer
- Paper
- Art supplies
- Tape recorder (optional)
Instructions
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Help your students pick a theme for their class book. You might suggest "Origins," a book about where everyone's ancestors came from. Or you might choose "A Day in the Life," featuring pictures and stories about a typical day at school.
Another idea is "Big Dreams," which would detail what each child wants to be when she grows up. -
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Assign one page to each child that will be completely his creation. The page may contain a picture he has drawn and/or colored, an answer to a question such as "What's your favorite lunch?" or a very short story. Since writing is something brand-new to this age group, answers and stories can be recorded in class and transcribed for the book using a fun font like Comic Sans MS, Americana BT, Boopee, MS Gothic or Lucida Console.
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Take candid photographs of your first graders as they work on their pages. These can be interspersed as dividers between the students' individual contributions. You'll want a group shot, too, for the introduction to the book.
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Scan flat artwork and save as jpeg files. For students who have been practicing their letters and numbers, be sure to scan these as well so that they can be uploaded into the book document. For items such as fingerpainting masterpieces, sock puppets, or shapes made out of clay, take digital photos.
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Enlist your students' participation in deciding the order of the elements for their book. This is a good opportunity to impart lessons about teamwork, decision-making, compromise, and telling a cohesive story. The more ownership they feel they have in the project--even at this young age--the more excited they'll be about sharing the finished product.
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Open a new document in Word and set your margins for one inch on each side. The easiest way to import your scanned images into the document and be able to control their size and placement is to create a series of text boxes. If you've never done this before, type "Create text box" as a query in Word and follow the directions provided.
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Use lots of color in the written content, as well as in your text box frames. Pump up the font size to between 26 and 48 to give it a picture book quality. Supplement the pages with clip art as long as it doesn't upstage the artistic endeavors of your students. Save the final product as an Adobe Acrobat file.
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Tips & Warnings
Since this project is being created on a screen, use this as a chance to introduce some simple computer skills. Invite the students to help you pick colors and fonts, as well as decide how to arrange the pictures.
Always make a back-up of the project while it's in progress.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit grunge illustration, children picture image by dip from Fotolia.com
