Hi Everyone, I'm very happy to be here. My name is Kevin and I'm a high school English teacher here in Japan. I used to blog a lot and sometimes write short stories for English language learners. I also am interested in basic reading research. So I was thinking about combining all of this together to try and put together a sample chapter of a book which contains: 1) a very short story of 500-1000 words with ~90% of the vocabulary consisting of the most frequent words of English 2) two to three pages of theory about how reading skills are developed and how reading the short story can help develop those skills 3) a series of activities to be used in lessons, or by a parent with their child, or by a group of friends which is also based on the theory in part 2. The completed chapter will, I hope, be about 8 to 10 pages and will serve as the template for the rest of the book. I'm also really excited to spend time with other teachers who are interested in material development and...
Oh, very cool topic! I definitely approve that. :) What sort of images would you have?
ReplyDeleteDorothy Zemach, Thank you for the approval : ) This is a passion of mine and I worked hard on developing the process! I really wanted your opinion or suggestions for images. I use a lot of color in my Powerpoint but few images. I am not sure if a paperback with colorful images is a better publishing idea.
ReplyDeleteDebbie Kellermann Is it posted in the Works in Progress? I'm not seeing it...
ReplyDeleteDebbie Kellermann Ah, OK, I found the powerpoint, in this section... sorry I missed it earlier! I was looking for stuff in the Works in Progress section.
ReplyDeleteYou can have color in an ebook, but color in a paperback would be much more expensive. It's not impossible... just expensive for buyers.
Can you format your ppt as a doc so people can comment on it? I presume too that a lot of those bullet points represent things that you discuss when you give the ppt, so would be fleshed out in a book. It's a little hard for me to guess how long a book based on that would be, but you might want to consider doing just a few units or chapters for this course, instead of the whole thing--that way you'll learn the process, and can apply it to the rest of the book later.
Remember too that things like your chart will have to be imported as images.
Dorothy Zemach, Thank you for the input. I will start working on the text today. I am going to start working on images and send some to you. I will have my daughter (who is an awesome artist) work on the front cover design and back cover design.
ReplyDeleteDebbie Kellermann We'll start with just an ebook, so you only need a cover for that. You couldn't start a paperback cover until the final text was done anyway, because you'd need a total page count. We'll do ebooks first, and then some people might add on paperback versions, but once your ebook is done, that will be easier.
ReplyDeleteThere are several templates on Canva that you can add a photo to, so if your daughter draws something, you could import that the same way. Handy to have an artist in the family!