CREATING WITH COMMUNITY – OUR FIRST BOOK
Is it really an innovation project if there isn’t some sort of hiccup? We wanted to dive right into our plan, but we had to wait for apps to be installed and cameras to arrive. As a team we were eager and maybe a little anxious to get creating. It just so happened that Family Literacy Day was coming up, and we decid- ed to start with a bonus project – a school- wide book. With Family Day coming up, our growing innovation team settled on the theme of “love.” We wanted our first book to honour the many ways we say love, show love and celebrate love in our community. We set up a backdrop by our kindergarten area and invited families to stop by before and aſter school. Aſter snapping a family photo, we captured their responses to three questions on video (an important piece later used to match images and audio responses).
1. How do you show love to each other? 2. What do you love to do together?
3. Do you know how to say love in another language? Aſter capturing our families and their re-
sponses, we started sorting through all the media and pulled our first book, Aylesbury Talks Love, together in the free Pages app for iPad. Family photos and common ideas made it to the page while family soundbites were dropped directly into the audio narra- tion of the book. Te book was published both as a digital EPUB and a physical hard- cover and then added to our library collec- tion and classroom libraries. It was cool to see the wide grins as kids recognized them- selves in the book or to have families stop me in the midst of my sales pitch to say they had already downloaded the book to listen to it. Several months later the excitement hasn’t died down; we still see families reaching for the book and reading it. Sometimes the best learning moments are
the detours. I realized so many of my interac- tions in the past with families came back to sharing what we had learned, communicat- ing where progress was being made or not made. Rarely did I get to just ask questions to learn about them. It was refreshing and inspiring. From our first project we could see how engaged learners were when they saw themselves and their families on the pages of books. Our hiccup project ended up shaping the direction of our designs moving forward and taught us an important lesson in valuing community voices.
12 ETFO VOICE | WINTER 2023
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