Writing for others beyond the classroom

Perhaps it is familiarity breeds contempt, or maybe it is just familiarity breeds a giving break. Either way, we do know that students will work harder on their writing when they know that what they are writing is going to be read by more than just their teacher, their parent, or the student next to them. So as the school year is ending and you are thinking about what to do next year, think about having your students produce and publish their work and put it out to the world. Below are two articles about how teachers have gotten their students to activity publish their work either as books or magazines. If you want to try some book publishing yourself (or with your students), you might want to start with a tool like StoryBird (https://storybird.com/), there you can write your story, then have it published into their digital library, and if you really want to you can even buy a printed (soft- or hard-cover) copy of the book for your shelves - or the school library's collection.

Ill. preschoolers develop literacy skills by creating books Preschool students at an Illinois school have written and illustrated two storybooks as part of a two-month project about story elements. After studying author Mo Willems' books, students wrote the books, learning about characters and plot to develop stories using Willems' character, "Pigeon."

Morris Herald-News (Ill.) (4/29/2016)

Ideas for using zines to teach communication skills Having students publish zines, or mini-magazines, gives them a creative project to develop visual and written communication skills, middle-grades writing teacher John DePasquale writes in this blog post. He shares several ideas and templates for zine projects.

Scholastic.com (4/29/2016)

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