Print your own children’s book

Can’t find a children’s book that suits the needs of your kids or students? Print your own!

My friend Louesa (“Mrs. Byrne” to her students) wanted to read her kindergarten-grade 1 class a book about the forest. The local forest. Problem? Mrs. Byrne and her students don’t live near an Amazonian rainforest (swinging monkeys, strangler figs) or a hodgepodge forest that doesn’t actually exist (California redwood? Arctic fox? African orchid?). They live in British Columbia, Canada. Mrs. Byrne could find very few books to suit her needs and when she told me, I looked too, and also came up short.

Were we being too picky? Maybe, but I don’t think so. We wanted a children’s book that:

• featured a forest the kids could easily visit. Without an airplane.
• featured plants, animals, etc. they could see, touch, and interact with, both in the classroom and in nature.
• was written for a 5-year-old audience.
• used photographs, not illustrations.

In a nutshell, we wanted a book that got the kids excited about nature at their own doorstep. We are surrounded by temperate rainforest here in Vancouver; we have amazing diversity: towering Douglas-firs, red cedars and bigleaf maple trees, bright red spotted toadstools, cheeky ravens, gigantic bald eagles and everywhere moss—coating the rocks, running up tree trunks, dripping from the branches.

I decided to make a book for Mrs. Byrne and her students.

The plan: How in the heck do you make a kids’ book?!

I needed inspiration. Thank Jebus for the “Looking Closely” series by Frank Serafini. Each book presents zoomed-in photographs of real creatures, inviting the reader to observe and predict (White-orange smudge: A painting? A snowstorm? What could it be?) before revealing the answer (a shubunkin fish!). I was introduced to Looking Closely by a colleague of Mrs. Byrne, Janice Novakowski, and promptly borrowed Serafini’s Looking Closely at the Pond from my local library to use as a template.

Mrs. Byrne wanted a forest book to compliment her science lessons. In kindergarten, the science skills focused on are “to use the five senses to make observations” and “share with others information obtained by observing” (Prescribed Learning Outcomes for Kindergarten, British Columbia Science K to 7 curriculum). With their endless curiosity, kids are natural scientists eager to explore the world around them, but they need help developing their scientific inquiry skills. Therefore, the book needed photographs to help the kids practice making close observations of objects as they appear in the real world.

The execution: Let’s make a children’s book!

I decided to apply Serafini’s format to objects I found in my local forest, Pacific Spirit Park. I packed my camera and headed into the woods, keeping in mind a few things I’d learned from working with Mrs. Byrne’s class:

• 5-year-olds are short. The 5-year-old’s world is tree trunks, adults’ legs and the ground. Use objects they can see up close.
• They rarely look up (without prompting). A red cedar is more recognizable, more relatable to a 5-year-old when you show the trunk and low branches vs. a sweeping shot of the far-away canopy. Take photos from their perspective.
• They are hoarders. A 5-year-old will lose their mind over acorns, leaves and cones—anything from the ground they stuff in their pockets. Use objects they can collect.

When I got home, I used the book-making feature in iPhoto (I’m a mac user) to edit the photos and build the pages. I researched several online picture book printing services—Snapfish, Photobook, Shutterfly; the template in iPhoto gave me the greatest formatting control, was the most user-friendly and the cost was comparable ($29.99 for 20 pages before tax & shipping, hardcover, $0.99 each extra page). For the writing, I used Serafini’s Looking Closely at the Pond as a template for content and layout. I used only easy-to-find plants and plant parts—Douglas-fir cone, sword fern, moss—and included facts for each species gleaned from my field guide Plants of Coastal British Columbia.

I included goals for our children’s book, written on the inside cover, as a sort-of roadmap to what kids can learn and practice using the book. They are:

1. To provide kids the opportunity to practice scientific inquiry skills: observing life around them more closely, describing what they see, asking questions.
2.  To set the stage for kids to further investigate, reflect and discuss the things and ideas that emerge as most interesting to them after reading the book.

And here it is, the finished book! All told, about 8 hours of work and $45.88 to print. A small price, in my opinion, if it helps Mrs. Byrne’s students become excited about the forest in their very own neighbourhood.

If you’ve ever wanted to make a children’s book, what cool topic would you explore and who’s your audience? Photographs, illustrations, a combination? Sky’s the limit! Now get out there and create 🙂