How to Use Printable Concept Books

printable-books-how-many-legsWhat are Printable Concept Books ?

  • These little printable books are designed to help younger children with reading/writing skills, as well as exploring feelings and concepts.
  • When I was teaching, we would complete one of these little books once per week – usually relating to the theme or teaching focus for that week.
  • A great idea is to use one of these books as a homework project for the week !
  • These little books actually allow for the children to become authors and illustrators .

Concept Book Sample

  • The completed books were usually taken home as the ‘home reader’ for that night and I made sure the larger whole class version was placed in the class library.  By the end of the year, or term, each child was able to take home a large class version to keep.
  • Try one of these Printable Books for FREE – download ‘I am very clever’ from our free downloads.

View Concept Books available from our Site

How do I use them?

  • The general idea of these printable books is to copy onto A4 paper.
  • They are then cut in half to make up an A5 size booklet for each child.

Printable Childrens Books - How to Use 1 Printable Childrens Books - How to Use 2 Printable Childrens Books - How to Use 3

  • Most of the little books have 2nd pages which can be copied as many times as you would like to make as many pages as you like eg. ‘I am very clever’..(see image above). Others have a set number of pages, eg. ‘Shapes’…..
  • You can make your books as big or as small as you would like using your photocopier or printer.  I found the A5 size was great for the children to draw pictures and write in comfortably.  I would always do up an A4 or even an A3 size book for the whole class for modelling first.
  • I used to go through this larger booklet as a whole class first.  We would brainstorm words or ideas and write them on a list before we wrote and completed our individual booklets.
  • Another option is to use the large version as a class activity, with each child just completing one larger page each – the pages are then collected and a book made up.
  • These larger versions were always placed in the class library.  My kiddies loved to read them during free reading sessions and silent reading.

My Reading Book   My Reading Book 2

You can print them all one one page using your printer settings (pages per sheet) – rather than a book if you prefer…..

Use a variety of media to produce the content of these concept books….

  • Most of the time the children would write and draw, but we could also use:
  • cut and paste words – copy our word cards onto more than 1 pages per sheet to make the word cards really small and fit on one or two sheets ( see here ) and or pictures from magazines, pre copied words
  • For the ‘Holiday’ booklet children brought in a photo of something they did in the holidays, we pasted the photo into the left side and wrote about it on the right.
    use different drawing media, painting, crayons, felt pens, collage, stamps, cut outs.
  • We would always, circle or colour in certain letters, phonic sounds, or words within the text until the black text in our printable books looked really colourful.

 

THESE LITTLE PRINTABLE BOOKS ALL WORKED REALLY WELL – THERE ARE JUST SO MANY WAYS TO UTILIZE THEM.