Lesson 3: Making Books and Publishing Student Work
Whenever you have students devote a great amount of time to producing some wonderful written work, it is always important that you find ways to display that work. The lessons in this course contain specific ideas on ways to display student work in the classroom.
This section will take a look at ways to "publish" student work and create long-lasting books and other more formal presentations.
Publishing student work
You should always be on the lookout for ways to make student work public. One program that I found to be of great value is the Newspapers In Education program: http://nie.lee.net/. Local newspapers become affiliated with the NIE program and offer daily papers to classes that participate. A wealth of teaching ideas and materials come along with the daily papers, and many are great opportunities for writing. This program works best above third grade, once students are better readers, and occasionally a little bit of "censoring" of the news may be necessary, but the educational value is excellent. The NIE program that I used offered a yearly contest and the writing that my students did for those contests was always great. Two of my students were actually state winners - "publishing" at its best!
Often local newspapers will have a column or a section that publishes student work. Look for these and send your students' work in regularly. The paper I now write for runs a column called School Views. Every week students write in response to a question posed by the paper, and about 20 student pieces are published weekly. The teachers and the students really look forward to seeing who will be published next - it is a great incentive to write. As a part of the program, classes also visit the newspaper office and get to see the workings of the paper from the inside - and what "real" writers do.
Another way to get students' writing published is to have them enter contests. I wouldn't overdo this idea, but look for one or two worthwhile contests for your students each year. Often civic groups, radio stations, or bookstores run writing contests. Again, entering the contest by producing a well thought out piece of writing is an excellent experience for your students.
There are also many online contests. I'd just caution you to check these carefully for their authenticity before sending your students' work. Same goes for sites that allow students to post work online - they can be great, but as always with the Internet - be careful!
Here are just a few links that you might be interested in:
Scholastic's Kids Are Authors: http://teacher.scholastic.com/fairs/kaa/
Young Naturalist Awards: http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/young... The 2003 contest is now over - but you might want to check this out next year for the 2004 contest.
Stone Soup: http://www.stonesoup.com/main2/sendwork....
So, whatever way you choose, try to get some of your students' work into print. They'll love it and it will inspire them to be even better writers.
In the next section, we'll take a look at making books in the classroom.
