Having a set time of the school day for Story Time is an incredible way to instill a love of reading, model fluency, and introduce new genres of stories to your students.
But for some of our students, reading anything is overwhelming and may cause distress. As teachers, we need to do our part in making all books accessible to all of our learners. Enter: making adapted books out of the children’s books you [and your students] already love and know.
It wasn’t until last school year that I started making adapted books out of published children’s books. I love to frequent the Good Will, yard sales, and Half Priced Books to get gently used books at discounted prices. They are the best books to use and repurpose.
Here is a list of supplies you may need:
So your first step to create an adapted children’s book is to choose the book.
And I like to have two copies of a book that I am going to adapt for my lower level learners. One as a teacher copy, and then one copy that I will adapt for students.
If you’d like to adapt the same book, you can find it From Seed to Pumpkin here. Grab my answer pieces for this story here.
{ Grab other Adapted Piece Book Sets here. }
Your second step is finding clip art and/or images that go along with the text. Boardmaker Online is a great place to start since a lot of use symbols or PECS in the classroom already. You can find quality work on TeachersPayTeachers and Etsy. Word does have some clip art built into the program, and you can always utilize Google image search. Another option is to photocopy images from the book and use those as your pieces.
You will need to read or skim the text prior to doing this because you don’t want to use just any images.
Part of finding the images you want to use, it also printing them in a user friendly size. You can purchase the book sets here and I’ve included sizing preferences in each PDF so you never print too big or too small.
Once you’ve sized and printed off all of the images you want to use, it’s time to put them in the story.
I recommend placing the pictures in a spot on a page that doesn’t take away from the text or the illustrations.
You can either glue the images on the pages, or you can tape them on with packing tape. I prefer to use the packing tape, because it kind of “laminates” the image into the book and gives the hook/loop a clean place to adhere to. (And it won’t rip off the image over time.)
Add hook/loop coins to the pages on top of the images and to the backs of the images you laminated.
If you chose a book that is not a hard cover, you have the option of using a binding machine to rebind it. This gives you more space for the spine of the book to expand with the sizing of the hook/loop coins.
If you want to use a binding machine to rebind the book, simply use an exact-o knife to cut off the spine. Then bind the pages as you would anything else.
Now it’s ready to use!
If you own this book and would like the pieces that I have used to adapt this children’s book, you can find them here.
{ Grab other Adapted Piece Book Sets here. }
What is going to be the first book you adapted for your lower-level learners?
