Binding Your Child's Stories Into Books

Thirty years ago, when I was in the sixth grade, I had an awesome artsy teacher who LOVED making us do projects that were crafty. At the time, it was a tedious project, and I certainly did not appreciate getting to do it, but one of the things she taught us was how to bind our stories into our own self-made books.

I bring this up now, because recently my daughter came across the books I had made, and read them over and over. Then my son joined in. I saw how much they liked them, so I said, "We can make these when we start our writing curriculum next semester."

"Okay!!" they both exclaimed excitedly.

What? My kids were excited about writing? I mean, they don't hate writing, but HAVING to write something can be laborious and not so fun. Now, however, they had a purpose. If they wrote a great story and bound it in a cool book, they have something to keep forever!

Even though it wasn't time to start our writing curriculum, I wanted to take advantage of their excitement, so I had them write a Halloween story, a Thanksgiving story, and a Christmas story. I expected to get a three to four page story at most, but my daughter actually wrote...get this...a chapter book! I couldn't believe it! And it was good! My son decided to write a series using the same characters and he did a great job as well. I do have to admit that my daughter's got shorter each story that she wrote, so I know that the assignments were too frequent in such a short time period (two months). She is the little critic, however, and said about my stories, "Some of these don't really have endings..." She was right! I had run out of time in the classroom, so they just stopped with no real ending. The joys of being homeschooled and being able to finish projects...

Here are their books. I challenge you to try this with your child, or come up with other ways to excite your kids about writing! If you are curious about how to make these, we will be creating and uploading a video soon!