How do I create my own student workbook?

When you were a kid do you remember using a workbook in school? The pages in the workbook were perforated so that they could be easily removed and the workbook would be filled with all sorts of fun activities. These workbooks are a great tool for learning. With limited budgets, however, a lot of schools can’t afford to buy a workbook for every student every year. For this reason, a lot of schools are choosing to use perforated copy paper to create their own workbooks. Here is a quick step by step guide to creating your own student workbooks.

1. The first step in creating your own workbook is to prepare the materials. Many different curriculum providers are selling master copy rights to their curriculums to schools or school districts. This is important since you don’t want to break the law or violate copyright law in creating your book. Alternatively, if you have created your own worksheets and curriculum you won’t need to buy a license to copy the materials.
2. After you secured the copyright to the materials that you will use in your workbooks you need to find a source for the perforated copy paper. You are going to want to buy copy paper that is perforated approximately 1/2” from the binding edge of the document. If your worksheets are going to be close to the edge of the paper, you might want to consider buying 9” x 11” paper so that the worksheet will still be letter size after it is removed from the workbook. This will allow students to easily tear documents out of their booklets. When shopping for perforated copy paper, it is important that you buy paper that is guaranteed to run through a copier or laser printer since you don’t want to deal with paper jams.
3. Now that you have your master document and the paper, you will need to make the appropriate number of photocopies for your students using the perforated copy paper. Be sure to allow your photocopier or laser printer to collate the documents for you so that you don’t need to spend time sorting the pages by hand.
4. Finally you are ready to assemble your book. If you are going to use a front and back cover on your workbook you will want to assemble them with your book at this point. Then you will need to bind your books together. For small books you can probably just use a few staples along the binding edge of the document. However, if your workbooks are too large for use with staples you will probably need to consider bind them with comb binding, since most schools have a comb binding machine. You could also use other types of binding with your workbooks including Unibind, thermal binding, Fastback, wire binding, coil binding or even Velobind. It really just depends on the look that you desire for your workbooks and the type of binding system that you have available to you.