Creating Books with Children, by Valerie Bendt, is a six week book-making unit study that will get the whole family involved! Week One covers Pre-Writing Activities such as selecting books, reading books aloud together, and completing copy or dictation exercises. Week Two dives into writing stories, how to decide what you want to write about, assisting our children develop their stories, having children dictate their stories, penmanship and rough drafts. Week Three covers text layout and editing. This is so much fun, making a mock up book, and laying it all out. Week Four covers illustrating your book! This week you study observing other's illustrations, drawing techniques, tracing, borders, making picture books, and more! Week Five is developing the beginning and ending pages and book jackets. Valerie gives a wealth of suggestions for books you can easily locate in the public library, to assist in our book making. Calligraphy, illustrating, writing, sketching, and more! Week Six focuses on assembling our books. Making the book covers, putting sketch pad pages together and sewing the pages together, wrapping them in their custom designed jackets and even ideas for 'commemorating' the books. Valerie has put together a wonderful resource on book making, which is a favorite at our house. It has encouraged writing, illustrating, story telling, and I can't peel my seven year old away from the books she's working on! Valerie makes learning so much FUN, together!