It took crayons, construction paper, scissors and creativity for kindergartners at Monte Vista Elementary School to become authors of their own book.
Students worked together to make books that illustrated words to help them with their reading.
“Repeated reading words are a strong foundation for beginning reading,” teacher Judi Doom said.
As students worked on their books, they referred to a picture book for ideas. The book “Mice Squeak, We Speak” had illustrations of animals with written text of the sounds the animals make.
Students drew the animals and wrote their sounds in bold letters.
For practice, they repeated the words and sounds.
Adam Komjathy, 5, colored an owl sitting on a tree branch.
“The owl hoots,” he said. “It’s nighttime and it’s fall.”
The students’ drawings will be bound into a book and sent home to parents, Doom said.
As some students teamed up for their book project, others worked individually to create booklets with drawings and words.
The children applied the words “long” and “tall” to construct simple sentences referring to objects or animals.
Using yellow construction paper, 5-year-old Bryce Park cut out a pencil drawing of the head and neck of a giraffe. He glued it to a piece of white paper and pasted a slip of paper to the bottom that read, “A giraffe is tall.”
“I’m going to cut the giraffe’s spots out,” Bryce said, carefully cutting circles from brown construction paper.
The project teaches students to practice words and helps them learn to follow directions, teacher Pamela Smith said.
“There are multiple-step directions,” Smith said. “Some of it is guided, and some of it gives them leeway.”
Some students completed other assignments before they had the chance to become authors.
In one corner of the classroom, a group of children practiced writing letters of the alphabet on erasable boards. The day’s letter was “M.”
“Every day we do a different letter to practice,” said Anna Gillins, 6.
Anna knows all the letters. Her favorite is “Z.”
“It’s zig-zagish,” she said.
Being acknowledged as authors by teachers and parents gives students a sense of accomplishment, Doom said.
“They feel a lot of success and pride that it’s their own book,” she said. “They’re authors, and they are a part of that process.”
