Students create their own full-color, online kids' books using Writing A-Z's Build-A-Book in the interactive Kids A-Z student-learning environment. Build-A-Book offers a library of thousands of images to spark ideas and help students illustrate their books. Students can create books from nearly any genre or on nearly any subject. Build-A-Book supports steps of the writing process with prewriting, drafting, revision, and publication to the Kids Writing Library.
Build-A-Book allows students to exercise their creativity as they select images and write text to design their own books. Students become class authors when you publish their books to the Kids Writing Library for other students in your class to read. Being published to the Kids Writing Library motivates students to write and gives them an authentic purpose to practice the traits of good writing.
Build-A-Book offers two versions of the tool for different developmental levels of writers.
Emergent writers
Tools for simple text and image editing
Images organized by background, characters and objects and by subjects
Single-page composition option for stage-appropriate writing
Beginning fluent writers
Robust tools for text and image editing to create special effects similar to those found in published picture books
Added search tool to quickly find just the right image
Multipage composition option to create nearly any kind of book
How to Use Build-A-Book
Assign students to create a fiction or nonfiction book in your Kids A-Z management hub or support independent writing by having students choose when to start a new book and decide whether to write fiction or nonfiction.
Some suggestions for how students might use Build-A-Book:
Have students create books that use elements of a particular text type.
Have students create books on a topic or genre that they have just read.
Create a book as part of a group project that shows what students have learned and encourages collaboration.
Provides students with writing prompts from which they can create books.
Two online graphic organizers—one for fiction and one for nonfiction—help beginning to fluent writers organize their thinking before they begin writing.
Two online revision checklists—one for emergent writers and one for beginning fluent writers—help students improve and clarify their writing before submitting it to your Kids A-Z In Basket for review or scoring. You can choose to place student writing in the Kids Writing Library from your In Basket.
