Create a Collaborative Book with your Students for Be An Author Month

Hosted by Book Creator, this amazing event highlights the power of reading and writing, turning classrooms, libraries, and school communities into vibrant spaces for creativity, self-expression, and fun!

My teachers and I have been having so much fun preparing to kick off Be An Author Month, brainstorming creative ways to bring it to their classrooms and students. As the district teacher librarian, I collaborate with teachers to design and implement engaging lessons and projects that support students and align with grade-level standards.

Through this partnership, we integrate information literacy, innovation, creativity, and meaningful technology use into learning. Be An Author Month is the perfect project to support my goals as a Future Ready Librarian, while also supporting the goals of the teachers.

While planning with our kindergarten team, I suggested creating a collaborative book for Be An Author Month. This approach allows students to share their stories while also aligning with our district’s vision of collaboration and communication. It’s a great way to support our young learners while making the project both manageable and fun for everyone involved.

In the Teacher Resources library on the Be An Author Month hub page, you will find templates, lesson ideas, and activities to support teachers and all grade levels.

I remixed the Story Templates for Grades K-5 that I found on that page to create…

…this super fun collaborative book story template.

With one of the main standards being Literacy: With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers, our focus was to find a topic they would love to talk about on their pages.

We decided to go with We Love Our School and have the kindergarteners share all of the wonderful things about Van Meter School. They love sharing things they love about school and will have no problem completing this project successfully.

Adapting the template to make it our own

After I remixed the Tell Your Story Template, I changed the cover to say We Love Our School, and created a short summary of the kindergarteners collaborative book.

I then added two pages for each student to complete. They will add a drawing, sentence, video and photograph of what they love about school.

I made a template of the space within the page so students can plan and draw a picture of what they love. I will scan these into the copier and then upload each into their Book Creator slide.

You can make a copy of the We Love Our School template - just click the Remix link.

It’s incredible to think about all of the different skills they will use while creating in Book Creator. They will draw a picture (even more with the tools in Book Creator), type a sentence and can even use speech to text, add a video, add a photo, and personalize it even more with other elements.

It’s incredible to think about all of the different skills they will use while creating in Book Creator. They will draw a picture, type a sentence and can even use speech to text, add a video, add a photo, and personalize it even more with other elements.

Our students will love being part of this collaborative book. It will be such a special project to share with our kindergarteners and their families. It will be part of our Be An Author Library so others within our school can read it too.

And a collaborative book can also be entered into the Tell Your Story Competition!

How to enter the competition

One-page PDF you can print

What a wonderful way to empower our students as creators as we encourage and support them in creating a digital product of their learning while engaging them in collaboration, communication and of course, creativity.

I can’t wait to share what the kindergarteners create in their collaborative Book Creator stories. And I can’t wait to see what your students create for Be An Author Month too.

You will find everything you need for Be An Author Month here, friends.