Publishing Ideas for Student Writing Part 1 - Bound Books

As a homeschooling parent, I have become quite familiar with the writing process over the past seven years:

1. Planning
2. Drafting
3. Revising
4. Proofreading
5. Publishing

In an attempt to encourage the young writers in my homeschool, I have tried to publish their writing projects in a way that makes my young writers feel as if their work is important - because their work IS important! The first way in which I have tried to do that is to give their finished projects a special place in our home.

In our school room, each of my children has a special box or boxes in which their published writing projects are stored. This keeps all of their finished writing projects in one spot and they can easily be located to share with others.

Over the years I have used many different methods to publish my children's writing projects. I am writing a series of posts focusing on the different methods that I have used to publish their writing projects. Today's post focuses on Bound Books. A child's finished writing project can be bound into a book in a number of different ways. One easy way is to take the finished project and simply place a comb binding on the edge to keep the pages together. I purchased a comb binding machine several years ago and use it to bind writing projects into books. Comb binding machines vary tremendously in price and I purchased mine on a clearance sale. I actually prefer the spiral binding to the comb binding so I take some projects to my local Staples and have them spiral bound.

In the example below, I took my youngest's fractured fairy tale, "The Three Little Goompas and the Big, Bad Piranha Plant" and glued each page to a larger piece of cardstock. Then, I used my comb binder and bound the pages together to make a book.

Here is another example of a bound book that my youngest son completed during his kindergarten year in his math course. I used my comb binder to bind the finished book together. For each of the numbers 0-10, he completed a page in which he practiced writing the numbers and then pasted the correct number of featured animals onto the page. I also included some of his worktext pages in the book as well. The finished product is a precious reminder of some of his math work from kindergarten.

Here is another example of a book that I bound together with my comb binder. This particular book is a compilation of pages that my youngest completed during preschool. The book is all about Thanksgiving and a wide variety of materials are used throughout the book on the pages. Lastly, a simple way to bind books together is to 3-hole-punch the book's pages and put them together in a 3-pronged folder. Below is an ABC book that my youngest completed during an art co-op several years ago. The teacher kept all of the pages until the end of the class and then bound them together in a 3-pronged folder to make a lovely book and keepsake.

Binding published writing projects using comb binding, spiral binding, or 3-pronged folders is just one way to celebrate your children's writing projects. In future posts I will discuss publishing writing projects using a wide variety of methods including paper bag books, 3-ring binders, lapbooks, paper plate books, and poster board projects.