How to Make Your Own Books for Homeschooling

Video Transcript

"I try to stay away from using real books in the beginning when I'm teaching a child to read because they will have a lot of words that they haven't learned the rules for yet and that can become confusing. We want to go slowly and step by step so therefore it becomes necessary at some point to generate your own hand made books. Now if you don't want to go through all this trouble, you can do this in your workbook like everything else in your notebook and you can just do it step by step. But I find that it's neat to make these little things, you can make them very quickly and you can slowly develop a library of them and keep them on a shelf. It also teaches a child the proper way to take care of a book if they mess it up, it's not like they're ruining a book they paid for. And the way we do it is very simple, take an 8 1/2 x 11 basic copy sheet, like this. Fold in half, staple it, boom, boom, boom. If you get a long arm stapler you can make it look professional and staple it right along the seam but you don't have to. And simple, title it, give it a simple picture. Use your creativity, but most importantly use only the words the child has learned up until this point. That will limit you and the story won't be Shakespeare, it won't be John Grisom but it will be a great story for that child learning to read. Start very simple. A cat sat. There's your picture, just throw in a little picture so they get some kind of sense yes I read it right, look at that. Now mix it up. A dog ran. Notice I didn't say a dog sat. We want to mix it up a little bit. If you use the same word on every page or even the same types of words, then they start to try to guess and they're not really trying to sound out. And then you can get a little more complicated. I usually won't do two lines until a little while later. But you can say a big rat was on the dog. A silly picture. Notice every word here is a word that you can sound out except for was and the which are a non-phonetic words that we've also learned through our flash cards. You can go on until the end and just create your own and make it as fun as you'll like. I usually take about 3 sheets, makes about 12 pages all together or you can do 4 sheets and have 16 pages."