Our Little Books

Today we talked about librarians and then we made our own books! We discussed how books have characters and usually some sort of problem that needs to be solved. Some kids followed this "rule" and others did not. But no matter how they did it, the stories were great! And for some reason, we had a lot of stories about princesses dying or being eaten. Hmmm.... Anyway, this is how we made our books. I just put together four small pieces of paper (about 1/4 the size of a normal piece of printing paper) and stapled them along the left side. I wrote "By ________" at the bottom of the front page. I let the kids draw some pictures as I went around the room asking them what was happening in their stories. I wrote the title for them and then a sentence or two on each page. On the last page I had written "The End" in dotted lines so they could trace it. Here's one of their stories:

Hot Air Balloon   By Morgan

 The hot air balloon crashed!

Then the airplane came and took the balloon to the hospital.

The hot air balloon got better and blew away.  The End

See? Short and sweet. I don't think my age-group could have handled a longer book, so I think four pages was perfect. Maybe if I could sit down with them one-on-one then a longer book would work. But in my experience, big groups mean shorter attention spans!