Kinder Meets Book Creator

23
Oct
2018

Kinder Meets Book Creator

I’ve never started making books so early in the year with our kindergarteners but, as Book Creator was perfect for what I wanted to do with them, I was eager to give it a try. My challenge was: Have our littlest ones illustrate AND record using an app they had never seen before, all in a 30 minute session! Challenges don’t scare me! Although, I have to admit, I did warn the teachers that I had no idea how this would turn out!

I’ll just say, children never cease to amaze me! These young students did a fabulous job in their creations and I am very proud of all that they accomplished! Here’s what we did . . .

I came across the book, I Need My Monster, by Amanda Noll. It’s about a child who creates a “comfortable” monster that lived under his bed; one that helps him overcome his fears. One day, the boy discovers a note from his monster saying that he’d gone fishing and would be back in a week. The little boy goes through a series of “substitute” monsters before his returns.

I thought the story would be perfect for a class book about silly monsters and how we wish they might help us. With only 30 minutes with students, it was important to do as much preparation as possible before class. Since we have shared iPads, I created a template and airdropped to each of our iPads, one for each class. Often, I’ll go ahead and add each child’s name to the name of the book but this time I color-coded the books so that each student just had to find the color of the “name” box that matched their class. For example, Mrs. Monroe’s class looked for the green box.

The children double-tapped on the name box, deleted that word, and wrote their name. Before learning about the other tools they would be using, we talked about what they would be drawing.

I showed some pictures of silly-looking monsters and asked what they would have their monster do if one showed up under their bed. Of course, there were giggles and, “That won’t happen!” We discussed that monsters really DON’T live under beds so we would have to use our imaginations!

Next, I gave a quick lesson on how to record. I didn’t expect the children to remember all the steps so it was primarily for the teachers who were in the lab helping. However, I was pleased to discover how many students did remember what to do!

Once we reached the “pen” drawing tool and I showed MORE colors section, you should have heard the excited squeals! My goodness, it was like opening a Crayola crayon box of 48 colors back when I was their age!

As the students drew, I read and shared the funny monsters in the book. When the first person finished, we had another “how to record” review with me modeling, “If I had a silly monster, I would want it to clean my room.” I debated about giving an example because younger children tend to do the same thing. We did have several that said that but there are still plenty of original ideas!

Would you believe that, even with only 30 minutes, everyone finished! And, we were even able to airdrop every person’s book to my iPad. Granted, there were a few that didn’t save their recording or didn’t remember to stop it (I can hear all the instructions I was giving in the background!) so there are a few I need to re-record. Still pretty amazing, though!

The books have been saved in a couple of ways: as ePub books to be read online and as videos. The videos are actually the same as the books but I pulled the content into iMovie so the volume could be adjusted to make the narration more uniform. *Title slides created in Adobe Spark post.