Make Your Own Book — Author & Illustrator

Your child becomes a real author and illustrator, making a small book with a beginning, middle, and end that goes on the family bookshelf to be re-read. The book is the point: a real artifact, made by them, with their name on the cover.

  1. Fold and staple a few sheets of paper into a little book (an adult does the stapling).
  2. Plan it together out loud first — what happens at the start, in the middle, and at the end? Three or four pages is plenty.
  3. Have your child draw one picture per page, in order.
  4. For each page, your child tells you the words and you write them down exactly as said — or they write what they can themselves.
  5. Make a cover with a title and “by [child’s name]”, and add “The End” on the last page.
  6. Your child “reads” the finished book aloud to the family, then shelves it.

Variation: skip the story and make an “All About My Cat” fact book — one fact and picture per page.

Requirements

  • Space: A table or any flat surface; a quiet spot for the read-aloud afterward.
  • Surface: Folded paper pages resting on a hard, flat tabletop.
  • Materials: A few sheets of paper folded and stapled into a booklet, crayons or markers, a pencil; stapler operated only by the adult. Optional: stickers, tape.
  • Participants: One child with one adult scribe; siblings can each make their own book or be the audience for the launch.
  • Supervision: Active adult involvement throughout — the adult does the stapling and acts as scribe; light supervision once the child is drawing independently.

Rationale & Objective

This activity rests on the writing-process and writing-workshop tradition begun by Donald Graves (Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, 1983), who showed that young children become genuine writers when they make the decisions real authors make. Katie Wood Ray and Matt Glover, in Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten (2008), argue that children are already writers and that bookmaking is the ideal vehicle: it foregrounds composition — having something to say and shaping it across pages — rather than handwriting mechanics. Making a bound book teaches the powerful concept that print carries a message that persists and can be re-read, and that a story unfolds in sequence, which is exactly the narrative writing in Common Core W.K.3 (“use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate… events in the order in which they occurred”). Taking dictation follows the Language Experience Approach, where the child composes the meaning and the adult scribes it, so a five-year-old’s ideas can outrun their slow, effortful letter formation. Head Start’s ELOF Goal P-LIT 6 (“writes for a variety of purposes using increasingly sophisticated marks”) and Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 19 (including 19b, writes to convey meaning) both treat drawing, scribbles, and invented spelling as real writing on a continuum. Putting the child’s name on the cover as author builds the “image of self as writer” that Ray and Glover describe as central. Honest framing — at five, most of the “writing” will be drawing plus dictation plus a few real letters or invented spellings, and that is exactly what developmentally appropriate authorship looks like; the goal is a child who thinks of themselves as someone who makes books, not a neatly spelled product.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: Draws a picture on each page with no clear order; dictates a single label or word per page (“dog”, “me”); the “book” is really a set of pictures bound together.
  • Developing: Pages follow a rough sequence; dictates a full sentence for each page; copies the title or their own name onto the cover with help.
  • Proficient: The book has a recognizable beginning, middle, and end; uses invented or phonetic spelling for some captions on their own; re-reads the finished book the same way each time, showing it carries fixed meaning.
  • Advanced: Plans the story before drawing; writes several captions independently; adds a title, “by [name]”, and “The End” without prompting; starts making books on their own initiative, sometimes a series with the same character.

Safety Notes

  • The stapler is an adult-only job — staplers pinch fingers and staples are a poke hazard; keep it out of reach and do the binding yourself.
  • Supervise any use of scissors for folding or trimming; round-tip child scissors only.
  • Use non-toxic, washable crayons and markers; watch that caps and small stickers don’t go in the mouth with younger siblings nearby.
  • Emotional safety: it is the child’s book — scribe their words verbatim; don’t rewrite, “fix”, or correct spelling or grammar, even when it’s tempting.
  • Keep sessions short; a single book can be made across several days, a page or two at a time.
  • Let unfinished books be okay — abandoning a book partway is normal and fine, not a failure.

Hints

  • Playfulness: Hold a real “book launch” — gather the family, introduce “the author”, and have them read it aloud; add a dedication page (“to Grandma”), a fake price sticker, or a hand-drawn barcode on the back.
  • Sustain interest: Make a series starring the same character; let the topic come straight from your child’s current obsession (dinosaurs, diggers, their pet); keep a dedicated shelf or basket of “books by [child]” they can revisit.
  • Common mistake: Taking over the story, narrating it for them, correcting spelling, or expecting independent handwriting — your job is scribe and audience, not co-author or editor.
  • Limited space / no equipment: One sheet of paper folded twice and torn makes an eight-page mini-book with no stapler needed; a single folded sheet makes a four-page book.
  • Cross-domain: Builds narrative and expressive language, sequencing and temporal order, visual arts and fine-motor control, and theory of mind when the child shows how characters feel.
  • Progression: Picture book with dictated labels → captioned picture sequence → invented-spelling captions → a planned beginning-middle-end story the child writes largely on their own.

Sources

  • Graves, D. H. (1983). Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Heinemann — the writing-workshop / writing-process tradition that treats children as authors
  • Ray, K. W. & Glover, M. (2008). Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten. Heinemann — bookmaking, composition over transcription, and the “image of self as writer”
  • Ashton-Warner, S. (1963). Teacher. Simon & Schuster — roots of the Language Experience Approach (the child composes; the adult scribes)
  • US Common Core W.K.3 (use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate an event or events in the order they occurred) and W.K.2 (informative/explanatory, for the fact-book variation)
  • Head Start ELOF — Goal P-LIT 6 (child writes for a variety of purposes using increasingly sophisticated marks)
  • Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 19 (demonstrates emergent writing skills): 19a writes name, 19b writes to convey meaning
  • UK EYFS Literacy — Writing ELG (write recognisable letters; spell words by identifying sounds; write simple phrases and sentences that can be read by others)
  • HighScope Preschool Curriculum — KDI 29 (writing) and KDI 28 (book knowledge)