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Best Idea Ever: Creative Classroom Memory Books

Education World's Best Idea Ever feature highlights a favorite teacher-tested idea designed to help you teach a lesson, manage a classroom, communicate with parents, impress colleagues and administrators—and amaze them all with your energy and creativity! 

Fourth-grade teacher Sandra Lee has been making memory books with her students for so long she can't recall where she got the idea. At the start of the school year, each of Lee's students is assigned a 3-ring binder, which Lee keeps in the classroom throughout the year and uses to organize students' writings. She also takes a digital photo of each student, prints the pictures, and laminates them on sheets of paper with name, grade, and year. (Students sometimes decorate those pages to create an attractive back-to-school bulletin board display.)

As the year progresses, completed writing assignments are added to the binders. Each piece is dated and kept in order. At the end of the year, Lee creates for each student a laminated page for student autographs. Then, each student's writings are bound together, with the autograph page (or pages) as the back cover and the photo page as the front cover, and a personal letter from Lee as well!

Submitted by a teacher from DeQueen Elementary School, DeQueen, Arkansas.

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