6. Making your own book - Telling real stories

In this lesson students will begin the process of creating an individual book, telling a real story about their life. The resource assumes that the book may be a picture book or a chapter book. Activities include suggestions for creating some artwork and images, but these activities can be excluded if students are only working on a chapter book.

Students will first reflect on the writing and editing process as covered in the earlier activities around making a class book and then apply their learning to a new individual text.

Depending on the class this activity can be combined with later activities to create a longer lesson.

Learning intention

Completing this activity affords students the opportunity to:

• communicate effectively for a variety of audiences and purposes using increasingly challenging topics, ideas, issues and language forms and features (EN3-1A)

• compose, edit and present well-structured and coherent texts (EN3-2A)

• identify and consider how different viewpoints of their world, including aspects of culture, are represented in texts (EN3-8D)

• recognise, reflect on and assess their strengths as a learner (EN3-9E).

Alison Lester: I thought you might like to see this book, which is the first book that I ever did. I did this one when, I think I did it when I was ten, I'd have to have a bit of a look at the date. It's very ancient. It's older than all your mums and dads, I bet. It might have a date written on it, Grade 4, so I was probably about eight or ten, I suppose, and it's called 'The Secret of St Clares' and it's really a terrible book. Like, no-one would look at this and go, 'Oh this kid's obviously going to illustrate and write children's books when she grows up.' Instead of doing a story about what I was doing then, which was like living on a farm, riding my horse and and having a good time, I wrote this stupid story about an English girls' boarding school because that was the sort of stuff I loved reading and it's a bit like now, sometimes when kids get a chance to write stories they do Harry Potter-type stories and it's always better to do your own sort of book.