Another Student-Created eBook- A Week in 2nd Grade
In the course of our iPad explorations in 2nd grade, some students made the choice to read ebooks that were in the iPad library. One of those books was the butterfly book, written by the first graders. Second graders loved reading the text and looking at the illustrations and photos in this beautiful book. They were also inspired to create an ebook of their own.
Julia reading the 1st Grader's Butterfly Book
Julia, who loves looking at the daily agenda, suggested that it would be fun to write a book about a day in 2nd grade. After discussions with the class, we settled on the plan to collaboratively create a book detailing, "A Week in 2nd Grade."
The first step was a collaborative brainstorming session to decide the most important and interesting things to include in the book. It was decided that each student would be responsible for writing and illustrating (via a photo taken with the iPad) one page. After deciding what to include and assigning pages, students used a graphic organizer as a pre-write to brainstorm ideas for their topic.
The next step in the process was to write a paragraph using paper and pencil. Finally, students were ready to use the Book Creator app on the iPad to create their page. As students worked on various stages of the writing process, teachers met one-on-one with the students to help them edit their writing. Because this process was quite long, not every piece of writing was perfectly edited. We felt that it was important to actually finish the project and publish the book and teachers did not edit student work without the student's participation. The writing you see, therefore, is authentic 2nd grade work and may contain some errors in spelling or grammar.
If you own an iPad or iPhone, you can download the ePub file and directly drop it into your iTunes library. Once you sync your device with iTunes, you are able to read our ebook .
If you are reading this post on your iPad, simply click on the ePub file and choose to open in iBook.
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May 19th, 2012 - 14:17
Hi! I love this idea! I’m looking for a cute end of the year iPad project for my second graders. I have one question though. We you able to have each student working on their page on a separate iPad and then combine the pages into one book or did you have to have them take turns making their own page on the same iPad?
Thanks for answering my question!
May 20th, 2012 - 13:29
I had them all working on separate iPads. After they finished the page, they took a screenshot of the page and emailed it to me (actually, I did this step for them, but they could have done it!). I compiled all the pages together on my iPad by uploading each screenshot into the Book Creator app.
May 20th, 2012 - 23:03
Thank you!