Spiker’s eighth grade honors ELA class makes children’s books
Ashlynn Wagner presents to Mrs. Rebecca Champine’s kindergarten classroom.
October 26, 2022
Mrs. Nicole Spiker’s honors English Language Arts class started making children’s books on Oct. 3. The goal was for the students to creatively come up with characters and a plot for a story.
The students will be creating their books on Google Slides. Additionally, they are working on an informational packet to look at pricing, font, text, and ratio of pictures to words in pre-existing children’s books. During that process they are to plan out their books. When they are finished with the packet on evaluating children’s books, they will start to work on the website.
“I think they will really be excited once they start the online portion, that’s more of the design, and not so much the writing portion,” Spiker said. After the kids are finished, they will divide into groups and present their books to all the kindergarten classrooms.
“Once we moved further into the packet, I enjoyed it,” Katelyn Clawson stated. She said the beginning of the packet was a lot of writing, but as they moved into it more, she started to enjoy it. She thinks the hardest part will be coming up with all the characters, plot, and setting.
“[I think the hardest part will be] having to write to make a child understand,” Jaiden Ingold said. He thinks his book will be about the character learning a lesson or teaching a lesson.
Lillian Spratt thinks that doing the packet was a slow process, but she is excited to move into the creative aspect of the assignment, writing the story and coming up with characters. She also thinks the hardest part will be writing the story so a small child can understand.
“Honestly, I think the hardest part will be drawing the pictures for the book,” Wyatt Waddingham said. His children’s book will be about space. He thinks the process of preparing to write the children’s book by doing the packet was “not fun, but not boring.”
Overall, the students think the pre-writing packet was not fun, but it was a necessary step. They were excited to start the creative process where they can write and illustrate their own books.
