Erin Smith

You are a starving children’s book writer struggling to make ends meet for your family.  Your agent calls to say she has just gotten a hot tip that Nickelodeon will air a new TV program next week. Your agent knows that there will be great demand for children’s books on that topic. He wants you to produce a book by next Thursday because he would like to pitch it to an editor at lunch that day. With any luck, it will be on the shelves by the holiday season. Parents will snap it up, and it will be a sure-thing bestseller! You’ll earn royalties and your family will enter the New Year fat and sassy!

Requirements for your book:

• It must deal with the process Mrs. Smith assigns you.
• It needs to contain accurate information. 
• You must break the process into no more than ten parts.
• The book should address a target audience of four- to eight-year-olds. 
• You must attract and hold their attention. 
• You must use appropriate vocabulary for your audience.
• You must design your own artwork.

Steps you should take:

• Research your topic. Don’t spend a long time doing this—just spend enough time so that you get a sense of the process. Write down your citation information.
• Next, determine the ten most important steps of the process. Some of the processes are quite elaborate and it will be a challenge to cut them down to the appropriate number of steps. It’s fine if some of the smaller, less interesting details are missing—it’s a kids’ book, after all. 
• Write the steps in language appropriate for your audience. You might also choose to include elements of a story (conflict? A character responsible for the process?), but you don’t have to.
• Sketch out the layout of your book
• Produce text and illustrations.
• Bind your book

You’ll draw one of these subjects at random:

Rubric for The Bestseller assignment

Assignment is complete and on time	5     4     3     2     1
Book presents accurate steps of a process	5     4     3     2     1
Book takes audience into consideration by using appropriate steps, vocabulary, storyline, etc.	5     4     3     2     1
Writer put forth effort and made story and illustrations appealing.	5     4     3     2     1

What this is: I created many assignments and teaching tools when I was a teacher. I wrote this as an introductory assignment to writing for a particular audience and writing a process analysis formal paper.

What I did: Keeping it as a lighthearted project was good because students were able to focus on the steps without getting stressed out or overwhelmed.

What I did: I wrote an introduction that would help them imagine a situation they might be in to really tackle this writing assignment.

What I did: After students completed this assignment, they worked on a longer, formal paper that asked them to choose a different topic and write for an adult audience.

What I did: Originally, students were allowed to select their own topic for this assignment, but they generally picked things that were easy like “making a peanut butter sandwich,” and all they did was list the steps. In subsequent iterations, I assigned more difficult topics and the results were more creative and the students said that they were better prepared to write the formal paper.

What I did: I gave them complex topics that they needed to research and then break into small steps. They were forced to look up and explain difficult vocabulary. Since the audience was children, they really needed to think about the audience’s needs and how to make the text accessible.