Teaching Writing: Children II

Lesson 3: Making Books and Publishing Student Work

Practicing the Picture/Story Connection

First, you will want to make students aware of how a book is constructed and the importance of the story/picture connection. Nothing will beat sharing some beautiful, quality picture books with your class. Even the older students enjoy picture books - but don't tell some of those macho 5th graders I said that!! While you are reading the book, discuss the amount of text that the author has put on each page, and let students tell you how the illustrations match the text. Point out that on some pages, there is very little text - sometimes only a line or two, and on other pages, there is a lot of text and perhaps no picture. This page variety makes the book interesting and adds to the enjoyment of the story. Once students have a sense of how a writer organizes the story into a book, you are ready to let students begin to try their hand at creative their own books.

If you are teaching a lower grade, you might want to have students use story paper and begin by illustrating a simple, short story. Story paper, for those unfamiliar with it, is a large sheet of manila or newsprint that is blank at the top and lined at the bottom. Hence - room for a picture and a story. Sometimes chart paper comes this way, too, for whole class projects. A tip: you can also use story paper with the writing at the top and the picture at the bottom for variety!

A good way to get young students thinking about making the move from a picture to a book is to take a short story and write one part of it on each of several sheets of story paper. Have different students illustrate each part. Then, put the sheets together and staple them at the end into a simple book. Now, when you read that story to the class, they will be able to see the way the writing and the illustrations were broken down to form pages.

You might also want to model this for the class. This can be done with any grade. Take a short story that students have read, and discuss where the class feels that the natural "breaks" in the story are. You'll want to try to divide the story into 5 or 6 parts. Next, write each section on the bottom of a piece of construction paper, leaving plenty of room for a picture to be added. Remember, short stories work best - or just do part of a story. Tape these to the chalkboard in order, storyboard fashion. Then, have the class discuss what types of pictures might work best with the text. You can have students actually do the illustrations, or you can just sketch in stick figures to represent what they have decided.

Another way for upper grade students to practice is to have the class create a mural story - each student can add a few sentences and a picture to a long piece of mural paper. Display it in the hall or the classroom when finished.

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