Making Meaningful Readers!

Hi everyone! It’s Jordan from Ferrell in First! I am so excited to be a part of this collaborative blog with these amazing people! I love reading all of their ideas and suggestions and checking out their super cute activities! 

I started in a new district this year (it's incredible!) and you know what that means? New curriculum. I was just getting used to pulling the things I liked and ditching the things I didn’t when I decided to move back to my hometown. I should note that I am not a huge curriculum user. They are merely just a resource, but one thing that I miss from my previous curriculum were all the amazing leveled reading books! I didn’t run out once throughout the entire year and the stories were genuinely enjoyable. Another thing I loved was the huge range of books I had access to; thank goodness because my kiddos were super diverse! Well, fast forward to this year and I am soooo missing those readers! I have readers that go along with the series but there is 1 book a week with only 6 copies! What is a girl to do? I am a firm believer of nightly reading and getting as many books into these young hands as possible! I had to come up with a solution and fast! I started searching for freebie readers on the ever amazing TpT but I wanted these books to perfectly align with my sight words and decoding based upon sounds I had already taught (pretty picky, huh?) I decided to teach myself how to make these little books because who knows my kiddos better? I thought it would be hard and time consuming and daunting but it has turned into something I look forward to creating each week! It just takes a little time and patience with yourself! Once you get the hang of it, you will not be disappointed! Here are a few of my freebies for you to look at so you know what I am yapping on about!

Check me out!

or me!

I use power point to make my books; that is what I am most comfortable with and I think it is so easy to use. Here is how you can make your very own!

First Slide/Cover Page:

Leave the left side of the slide blank and the right side will be your cover page of your book! I like to put a line down the middle of the page while I am working just to make sure I am not going too far on either side so I have a nice clean fold! I delete it at the end!

2nd Slide:

On this slide you will use the left side as the 1st page of your story! The right side will be left blank and will end up being the very last page of the story. If you wanted to add in sight word practice or a few blank lines for sentences this would be the perfect spot for it!

3rd Slide:

The 3rd slide is important too! On the left side of the slide you will make your last page (with words that is! Remember, I said the actual last page is blank or has room to create an activity.) The right side of this slide is page 2 of the story!

4 and 5:

On these slides, remember that if you want the pages to be next to each other when you open them up in the story, they can’t be on the same slide! For example, in one of my finished little readers, the left to right spread read “I see a big hat.” The next page said “I see a little hat.” To do so your slides have to look like this...

Final Slide (yay!):

This slide gets to be the middle page so you can create straight across the page! Like this…

If you want to download a 'how to' powerpoint that has the slides laid out, click here! 

*You can make these books as long as you want them to be, just follow the layout and make sure there are an even amount of pages! When you go to print these books you will need to flip every other page upside down in order to run them properly (1-2 sided.) I hope this wasn’t too confusing and you get to creating some meaningful readers for your classroom very soon! Please feel free to leave any questions and continue to stop back for some amazing future blog posts!

Happy Teaching,

Jordan