Lynn Lau
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jun 22/01) - Heads down, crayons and felt markers flying, the students in Gayla Meredith's Grade 2 and 3 class are busy making books -- 250 books to be exact.
Friday, they were "publishing" their last one of the year. For these Range Lake North students, that means laboriously col-ouring 36 copies of the same page to be incorporated in their homemade class yearbook. But they love it.
"I'm on my 11th copy," said Dakota Hamilton, 8, busy colouring green treetops. "I'm doing this side and that side and I have to do it all over again 25 times. It takes a long time."
The end product will be 32 yearbooks, one for each of the 28 students, plus four extras for the classroom and library.
Meredith has been getting her students to create books all year, integrating topics from the curriculum, like fractions, multiplication, dinosaurs, undersea life, poetry and geography. Most of the books are unique, but for the yearbook, it's mass production.
She first incorporated book-making into her classes about four years ago, but this year production has snowballed. The kids have been making books all year, colouring illustrations, writing stories, creating tables of contents, glossaries, book summaries and full colour overlays.
"It also gives the students a sense of pride to complete a book," Meredith explains. "As we worked through this they started adjusting, and saying, 'Can we make a book on this? Can we make a book on that?' They really like the end product and they felt good about what they were doing."
The end products are everywhere. Tacked to one wall are clear plastic pouches full of books. There are more on the chalk board ledge and by Meredith's desk, there is a rack full of books.
"They're fun," says Mark Leonardis, 9, who worked out an assembly line to get his pages coloured. Every page gets blue first, then the next colour, then the next.
"I was thinking in my bed at night that if I coloured each page (separately) I might not be finished on time. So I decided to do it this way so I would be finished on time. You don't rush through a book because if you rush, it will be messy and you won't be proud of it.
"Our class is really proud because we made 250 books."
