Free fun - guide for kids to write a book together

With summertime boredom facing all us why not write an on-going story? This can be done with-in your own family or on a larger level including neighbors or extended family.

My Mother-In-Law started an on-going story to connect all 11 grandchildren, split between 5 families. Four of us live around the US and 1 lives overseas. In January, one family receives the short start of a story such as "On Tuesday, Grandma heard a knock at the door. When she opened the door she was so shocked to see" each family member (yes even the parents) are to take turns adding between 1 and 5 lines before mailing it on to the next family. This continues until it gets back to Grandma who after adding more, starts the cycle over sending the start of the next story but mixing up the order. When Grandma gets it back the second time, she finishes the story. Then she sends a page (written by someone else) to each of the grandchild (with a clean sheet) to add their illustration to. Nobody is to show their page to others before they are mailed back. Grandma then makes 11 copies of the story as well as drawings and has them spiral- bound together, titled and dated. Everyone's name is listed as an Author on the inside page. These have become wonderful treasures!

We have also done this at sleep-overs: with each child adding a page and then either illustrating their own or another page. We then made copies on our copier and put the “books” together ourselves with each child designing their own cover.

A couple of tips:

Some kids prefer to illustrate their own page, in fact they can get upset if another person “get’s it all wrong.” So, when we do them, we always have the person write the page: pass it on and then work on their drawing while the next person(s) is writing.

If you don’t have a copier, you can get copies at Staples (or another office store) for very little. You can use the color copier for the pictures and the black and white for the words.

When the kids are too young to write well (or to give the book a more polished look) take each page and redo it on your word processor, you can then just print out the number of needed copies, omitting the need to make copies.