Literacy & Learning- Evolution of a Preschool Class Book

For those of you who are not aware, our friends here at Creative Minds are quite interested in books! We love to explore books on our own, read them in small groups, and listen in group story time. But, something many of our friends had not tried yet was writing a book.

Last fall, we decided to change that. The two Creative Minds Preschool classrooms worked collaboratively to come up with an exciting adventure filled with mystery, intrigue, and heartfelt friendship.

We sat down early in the fall to talk about what we would like to write about. Our first discussion actually

lead to an extensive list of what we did not want in our story, as friends were coming up with some ideas that made other friends uncomfortable.We discussed as a class what we would and would not like to happen both in the story and in our classroom.

Once we had established the ground rules, we began to brainstorm. Friends were invited to think of anything they might want in the story from character names to plot points to setting. Everyone's ideas were written down, and we talked together about which points fit best together. As you can see below, we came up with quite a wealth

of ideas.

Once we found a focus with our space plot, we still had some friends taking some pretty wild tangents (e.g. What happened next?", "What did they say?"). They still skipped around quite a lot, but we were much more able to keep focused on the characters, the setting, and the conflicts we had created. And, with the inclusion of the giraffes and the dinosaurs despite the unlikely setting, we were able to accommodate many different ideas in one (relatively) cohesive story. Our first and second drafts (with some extensively messy edits) are below."And then Spongebob came and Patrick was his friend."). I decided to get them into the real structure of the story- writing actual sentences- to keep them focused. I asked questions (e.g. "And then what happened)

With the story written, we then had to move on to illustrations. Friends worked with a variety of different mediums to create over 30 pages of art that expressed to them the sentences they chose from the story.

After months of work and much debate over the title (Ghost Fighters was the final decision), story order, and who got to illustrate which sentences, we came out with a final product we are all quite proud of. The electronic copy is provided here (Warning: It is 26 MB).

You can print it out at home or use a book printing service (such as Blurb). Please feel free to browse through it in the classroom as well. We would love to have your feedback!