Using Book Creator to Make Books in Kindergarten!

The app Book Creator is one of my absolute favorites. It's one of the most expensive apps I've bought, at $4.99, but also one of the most versatile. Students (yes, even kindergartners!) easily learn how to navigate and use this app across a variety of subject areas to create and share about their thinking and learning. Read on to see how we used this in Mrs. Robson's kindergarten to create ebooks about polar bears.

Mrs. Robson's kindergartners have been researching and learning about polar bears for a week. Together, they completed a book with an adorable craft on the front cover, and images and facts throughout the rest of the pages.

Since this was the first Book Creator book these kindergartners have made, we kept our process simple. These students are familiar with the Feltboard app ($2.99), so they each made an image for their front cover in Feltboard. We talked about what makes sense (if it's about polar bears, do we add cats, butterflies, fall leaves, etc). They used the letters in Feltboard to add the title: "Polar Bears", then saved their images to the camera roll of their iPads.

We then met at carpet to get an intro to using the Book Creator app. We began by just making the cover of our books - I showed them how to start a new book, insert an image, and use the text tool to add their names. I then showed them how to "make it fancy" by clicking the "i" and changing the font, font size and color. I love that Book Creator automatically saves as they work, so we could easily break after this step, meet at carpet again, and talk about what to do next.

After all of the covers were built, we came back to carpet and I showed them the audio tool. They added their voices to the cover, reading the title and their names. We then used the audio tool and camera tool for the rest of their pages. Since they had already written their pages, and the goal of this lesson was simply to teach how to use Book Creator, I didn't ask them to type any words on the other pages. I showed them how to use the camera tool in Book Creator to take photos of the art project and other images from their paper polar bear books, then use the audio tool to record facts. For example, the first page of their books was photo of the polar bear craft they made, with an audio recording telling the most interesting fact they learned about polar bears.

Allowing students to begin by using the camera and audio tools helped them become comfortable with the app without overwhelming them. They built wonderful books that were then easily sharable via Seesaw! From the "My Books" page, they shared as videos to Seesaw that their classmates and parents can now view and listen to. Great job, kindergartners!