Sharing Our Stories

Today’s Contributor: Randi Sather is an NBCT Librarian and Campus Innovation Connector at Perez ES.

Thanks to a Student Opportunity grant from the Austin EdFund, all students at Perez Elementary had the opportunity to become published author & illustrators this year! For this project, teachers guided students through the writing process, emphasizing the importance of sharing their voices and stories with the world. Each PreK-4th grade student produced a final piece of writing/illustration to contribute to a class book and 5th graders each created their own individual books. Titles range from “The ABC’s of Mindfulness” to “Foods Around the World” to “Lo que me hace única/What Makes Me Unique” and so many more. In addition to their self-selected stories, we also invited Perez families to contribute a story about their family or write about a tradition they celebrate. These were then compiled into Family Stories books for each class. Then we sent the books off to be published into hardcover books and will be adding them into the library collection for check-out. In the end, we published 170 books by Perez students & families!

And now, after this amazing journey of writing & creating, our published books have arrived (take a sneak peek here), and we can’t wait to share them with our community at our upcoming school-wide Perez Publishing Party!
In order to share our stories even further, we also created video read-alouds of each book. I will add the QR code of the read-alouds to the physical books so readers can listen to the authors tell their stories and we’ll share the link with family members who may be far away or unable to attend the event. While this is specific to our project, you could easily create a similar video of your students sharing any project or reading a favorite book.

See below for the process: