Submitted by: Jeff McRitchie(306) MyBinding.com Log in to become a member of Jeff McRitchie's Fan Club!
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 (and maybe not so
fun) activities. These workbooks are a great tool for learning. However, with
limited budgets a lot of schools can't afford to buy a workbook for every
student every year. These workbooks can be very expensive and cannot be reused.
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 (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.
With these four simple steps you can create your own workbooks for your
students and save a lot of money buying expensive curriculum. Even with the cost
of the paper and the photocopying you should be way ahead with this method than
you would be trying to buy every student in your class their own workbook. Try
it for yourself and see how well it works.
Jeff McRitchie is the designer and Director of Marketing for MyBinding.com. He has written
over 100 articles on binding machines, binding covers, Perforated
Papers,binding supplieslaminators,laminating supplies,paper handling
equipments,binders,index tabs, and shredders.
This author of this Article has choosen to make this article available with free reprint rights. Click here to copy this article.
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