Saturday Sample: Build a Book Workshop by Gill James, still water,

Introduction

The Build a Book Workshop is about getting your students to create a book in a limited amount of time. They look at the whole process of how a book is made: writing, editing, selecting, designing, illustrating and marketing. This workshop enables students to see what is involved in producing a book and motivates them to start and to complete a piece of writing. 

They actually produce a book. It becomes a tangible object that sits on a shelf. You may also opt to have the book as an e-book and a web site if you wish. 

This process is very adaptable and can easily be used to build a book in a day, two days, a week, a month, a term or a year.

Some work needs to be carried out behind the scenes, some of which is quite technical, and this guide shows you how. If the technical work is too much, we also show you ways of getting help with that as effectively as possible.

Everything described in this manual for teachers is based on the experience of producing anthologies of children’s writers with schools. All of the books have supported a charity – in two cases this was the schools own library - and in all cases students’ confidence in their writing has increased.    

The Build a Book Workshop can be extremely cross-curricular and offers your students opportunities to:

·       improve their writing

·       understand the world of publishing

·       work collaboratively

·       understand the wider community

·       support the wider community

·       understand how businesses work

·       improve their IT skills

·       take part in an enterprise activity

 

This manual contains a step-by-step guide to setting up a Build a Book Workshop and making sure that a book is produced at the end of it. There are several choices at each stage of the process. It is probably a good idea to read it from cover to cover to start with and then work through it section by section when you have a clearer idea of your workshop shape. 

You may also order a book containing photocopiable resources from our web site. You may purchase this as a hard copy or as a PDF file. Also a template for formatting your book is available from our web site.