by Kris Kennedy

Created on: July 16, 2010

Publishing and Preschoolers

Preschoolers know of publishing because of the books read to them. It adds to the preschool experience if they can learn how the books come into creation. It can be a unit project with the use of a computer, camera, local author and your local newspaper.

Talk About Writing

When you read a book to the group, tell about how a book comes into existence. Before reading, have a discussion of what are fiction and the creative process. Following the reading, you might engage in a discussion of a possible description of the author. Some of the responses could include that she was like me since I like apples or something else in the story. With this comment, you can tell how authors frequently write about something that the author knows about. You could mention the television show Little House on the Prairie and that it came from the retelling of Laura Engels Wilder's life in Minnesota in books. If you know an author, you can invite the author to come to class and read one of her books and tell how she developed the book. The class visitor sets the scene for the follow up activity.  

Class Activity

While out in the playground or in the classroom, the teacher or employee takes pictures of the kids. The teacher prints up for another day. You would mount the pictures on a poster board with a separate blank sheet. On the sheet the children help write a story about the pictures. After compiling the picture with its narration, the compiled pages appear in notebook for reading during story time.

You can give the children a second chance of writing a story. You could than turn the task around. You could write a story together. Once written, you print pieces of the story on pages; the children draw pictures of the story. Again, the pages in a notebook provide the next story-time. The original stories provide experience with the creativity process. Do the children understand how it goes from creation to print?

Field Trip

You can enlist assistance from your local newspaper. Some newspapers have children's pages and you can use these pages to familiarize the children with the nature of newspapers. A field trip to the newspaper could illustrate to the children the knowledge how creation goes from creation to final product. A newspaper might be willing to print one of your books.

Publishing offers a change from the normal preschool activities, but it gives them a reference to the process for future education activities. Preschool children practice many other creative activities, which should include publishing.

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