Yearbook curriculum

Your yearbook committee is a wonderfully inclusive environment, where students of all experience and skill levels can come together to learn, collaborate, and produce something meaningful. And that’s a wonderful, beautiful thing. As you welcome in all your new committee members for this year’s book, however, you may find yourself needing to teach a lot of skills to get these new members up to speed. Teaching your students the right lessons, and giving them valuable skills, helps make the yearbook process run easier, smoother, and with far fewer problems. So here are our tips on which are some of the most important lessons to start their education.

Knowing What To Teach

Your time is one of your most valuable resources, and while you’d love to spend every day in deep mentorship, you won’t be able to do that. There is, after all, a yearbook to create. Here are the important areas you need to make sure your staff is trained on. Interviewing techniques. A good interview is much more than just asking a few questions. Students need to know how to make people comfortable and how to elicit the best answers.

• Lesson #1: Focus on asking the right kind of questions. Open-ended questions create the best answers, so teach your class how to avoid leading questions. “What was the final score?” is boring; “What strategies were employed to lead the team to a win?” is an example of an open-ended question that allows the interview subject to think beyond cliches.
• Lesson #2: How to make an interview subject comfortable. Not everyone feels relaxed when interviewing, but focusing on getting the subject in their comfort zone makes for the most relaxed and genuine quotes.  Letting the interviewee talk, and actually listening, are both skills you’ll want to teach.

Writing. Not everyone knows how to properly structure a yearbook article, and even the best natural writer might struggle with the format. Writing an article that quickly brings out the heart of a story is closer to journalism than creative writing, which your students might be more used to.

• Lesson #1: Headline writing. Teach students how to pull out what makes a story unique, and how to sum that up in one phrase, while still giving a nod to the theme.
• Lesson #2: Writing killer copy. Students are going to want to really show off their skills, so you need to teach them how to be brief, how to tell the story, and how to focus on the subject. Sometimes writing simply actually packs more of a punch.

Photography. Similar to writing, students have to know what makes a great yearbook photo, how to find it, and how to compose it. Lessons in camera operation, photo composition, and other photography techniques are important here.

• Lesson #1: How to take candid shots. It’s more than just pointing and shooting. Students have to know how to compose on the fly, and how to spot great photos before they are gone.
• Lesson #2: Using the camera correctly. Composition, the rule of thirds, how not to over-or-underlight, and how to avoid annoying imperfections are all important techniques to learn. Students can have a great eye, but improper camera use makes that moot.

Editing. There are two sides to editing: spotting mistakes, and understanding what can be cut (and what can be left in). Both are equally important.

• Lesson #1: Teach them the layers of editing needed for any piece. Editing is about getting a lot of eyes on any piece, so a lesson about how to progress a piece through the editing assembly line can help prepare them for when copy really starts rolling in.

• Lesson #2: Reading out loud. Demonstrate multiple proofreading tips, including how reading out loud can help people find errors that reading to yourself can’t always uncover.

Photo editing. Figuring out the best arrangement, what to keep, what to lose, and how you can manipulate photos is both an art and a science.

• Lesson #1: Adding text to photos is a great way to spice up and add depth to a normal picture. A lesson here can be about the proper use of it and how not to overdo text.
• Lesson #2: Editing student submissions. You’ll probably be doing more and more crowdsourcing of photos, so learning how to adjust for color contrast and brightness can help enhance student photos without changing what the submitter intended.

Page layouts. Combining articles, headlines, photos, and captions in a way that makes sense, is aesthetically pleasing, and has a natural flow is not an inborn skill. This is where training might be the most important.

• Lesson #1: How to play with font. Using different kinds of fonts not only enhances the texture of a page, but it can help fit in things that a uniform font might not. You’ll probably want to deliver a lesson on how to do it without overdoing it.
• Lesson #2: The Golden Ratio. There is an aesthetically pleasing pattern that is produced both by humans and in nature,  that draws the eye and produces a sense of balance--and repeating it in your yearbook is a solid way to ensure your layout is easy on the eyes.

These lessons are not just important for your yearbook, but is a great way for students to develop skills for the future and grow more confident in themselves. It’s the heart of being a mentor, and one of the great joys of running the yearbook.

When you get a bunch of parents willing to help you make your elementary school’s yearbook the best it’s ever been, you’re bound to run into some … err … hiccups. After all, your volunteers will have their own ideas of what will make the yearbook great. To harness all those great ideas (and, let’s face it, all those not-so-great ideas), you need to do one thing really, really well: Follow the Golden Rule. Do that and you’ll have your elementary school yearbook committee running like a well-oiled machine.

9 Handy Reference Tips for Building Management Skills

OK, so “Follow the Golden Rule” might be oversimplifying things a little bit. To be more specific, here are nine tips you can use when you’re managing a yearbook committee composed of adults:

1. Be transparent. Explain to parents the reasoning behind your decisions--understanding where you’re coming from will help them be satisfied with your arrangements.
2. Actively listen. Don’t just hear what people are telling you--actively listen to what they’re saying. Empathize with them, and try to understand their perspective. Truly relating to someone else will take you a long way.
3. Be accountable. Everyone messes up. Everyone. It’s OK if that happens, so long as the person who made the mistake takes responsibility for his or her actions. And the best way to have that happen is to act the same way. If you make a mistake, own it.
4. Learn from your mistakes. As noted above, taking responsibility for those mistakes is important, but it’s even more important to learn from them.
5. Build relationships. Connect with everyone involved, including your staff, parents, teachers, administrators, and even the publishing company. Doing so will ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to the yearbook and the committee’s plans for it.
6. Have patience. Yes, you have deadlines. The layout isn’t finished, the photos are blurry, and three members aren’t able to make it to the next meeting. Understand that things come up, and if you feel pressured, don’t be afraid to ask for help as needed. Also, building a bit of a buffer into your calendar can keep minor setbacks from becoming major holdups.
7. Trust your staff. While you might have a vision of the perfect yearbook and are trying to micromanage everything to create this vision, step back and let your staff do their jobs. Make yourself available for questions and concerns, and only step in if someone asks for assistance or if you are truly needed.
8. Use good judgment. If you’re approached with a staff request that doesn’t fit the book’s vision, it’s okay to say, “No.” While it’s important to hear any and all requests and keep an open mind, don’t be afraid to toss out any ideas with which you’re not comfortable.
9. Be proactive when solving problems. Don’t wait until the last minute to tackle issues. In many cases, issues left unresolved will snowball, and you will find yourself facing an even more complex problem than before.

If you were to put this into a real-world example, it might look something like this: Say you have a bunch of parents who want to take pictures at sporting events, but no one has volunteered to edit photos or lay out the sports pages in the yearbook. You could tell some of those volunteers that you simply have too many people who want to take pictures and that they need to do something else. But that wouldn’t really be following the Golden Rule, would it? Remember, these are parents who are eager to help, so it might be better to approach the situation a little different. If you do, you’re far more likely to get all the help you need. (You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, right?) A better approach might be to tell all of your volunteers that you simply have too many people who want to take pictures, so you’re going to divide the role into specific sports or times of the year, but that it’d be really awesome if they could also help you with other aspects of the yearbook’s sports coverage, like editing the photos or laying out the pages, because you have no one to help with that. Another approach might be to talk with people who volunteered for similar positions, explain the situation to them, and ask if they’d shift over, instead. In essence, help everyone do what they’re wanting to do, but also be clear about why you need the other help. It’s the best way to make sure everyone is involved in the way they’ve requested, while also having all your roles evenly distributed across the committee.

Go With the Flow

Any committee comes with a diverse group of people, each with their own creative juices, ideas, and dynamic personalities. Interacting with and managing these personalities is an integral part of being the yearbook adviser, but keeping them on track to create a successful elementary school yearbook doesn’t have to be stressful—especially if you follow our handy tips.  

As you begin to prepare for the first day of school--and all of the yearbook content that comes along with it--you want to make sure you capture all of the most important moments on film. To do so, you'll want to identify and develop a list of these opportunities up front, to ensure that none are forgotten. This list will also help you plan for moments that are taking place at the same time, at opposite ends of your school, making sure you've got coverage for everything. Below, I’ve chronicled my own top five moments that I feel any adviser should strive to include in their content. Take these, and use them to jumpstart your own list of moments for your committee to capture.

Kick Off the Day

One of the first memories you want to nab for the pages of your book is when students come into school for the first time this year. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, they’re ready for what the year has to bring--eager to see all of their friends again after a long summer break, and a little nervous to meet their new teachers and classmates. This translates to excitement for the first day of school--and that means super photogenic kids who are going to shine on the pages of your book. This is a moment you definitely don’t want to miss.

Pep It Up

Many schools have special events on the first day of school that are perfect for fresh yearbook content! This includes anything from an all-school pep rally to a parent breakfast after the first bell rings. Prep for these moments by getting a list of all the special first day of school events on your campus from your administration, and coordinate to have a photographer and/or writer from your committee present to capture all the fun for your publication.

Locker Stalker

The time of year when your students’ lockers are the cleanest--and look closest to those locker idea photos we all love to check out in the magazines--is on the first day of school. If you plan to incorporate a locker feature within your book, now is the time to cover it! Try to get some photos at the beginning of the day or at the very end, when students have a few more minutes than they do between classes. And make sure you have your question prompts laid out well in advance. Getting your pictures and interviews early also leaves your options open for turning this into a 'before and after' feature, revisiting these lockers to see just how messy they might become!

Walk the Catwalk

The first day of school also happens to be when the majority of your students look their best. They’re wearing their fresh back-to-school clothes, their hair is done, their shoes aren’t scuffed. Take advantage of this photo op with a fun first day of school fashion feature! You could even turn it into a cute pop culture piece, showing what kinds of clothes--styles of jeans, colors of tights, types of shoes, etc.--were popular at the start of the school year. It’s something fun for them to look back on (and maybe cringe at) for years to come.

Capture the "New"

Summer is generally the time when the school district can make some changes to the facilities. Maybe it's a new basketball court, or a new jungle gym. Perhaps classrooms have been rearranged. Whatever it is, the first day of school is your best chance to capture students' genuine reactions to the new element gracing their campus. So station a committee member there, and take photos and get quotes. While you may have so many ideas later in the year for special features that this one might not appear in your book, you'll never have another chance to document it--so remember that old adage of "better to have it and not need it..."

Plan the First Day of School Right

The first day of school is a big one for your yearbook content. It’s important to kick off the year right, and capture all of the best moments for some cool features in your publication! So start planning out the moments you want to capture, and what you’ll need to make that happen. With a little foresight, you’re sure to get all the best snapshots for the pages of your book.

Part of the fun that comes with helping to create a great publication is bonding with the rest of your committee. In my experience, this is the thing that really draws new members to your team: the opportunity to join a fabulous circle of friends. But in order to guide your members towards working as a team, and really spread the word that your yearbook committee is a great group to join, you need some exercises that get each of your committee members on the same page. This means you need to find a way to help them bond as a group, thus creating a positive, enjoyable working environment for all. Positivity exercises are something that I love using for this type of task. They’re uplifting, and build up each of the individuals you work with, which helps them to recognize their strengths. And to help you get started, today I’m going to walk you through one of my favorite exercises that does just that!

Start the Positivity Flow

After you’ve been working with your yearbook committee for a few weeks this fall (so they've already gotten to know each member a bit), devote some time during a meeting for a team-building exercise. Tell them that you want to talk about each individual's wonderful contributions to your committee. To start, have each person come one at a time, and sit in front of your whiteboard at the front of the room. Then have every other person on your committee write positive things about that person on the whiteboard around them! They can write great characteristics about the person, unique skills that they use to bring something special to your team, or even just little notes about their general attitude. The point is to focus on what each individual offers that’s great!

Use the Exercise for Success

To make this kind of positivity exercise really stick, take a picture of each yearbook committee member smiling, surrounded by the positive notes that the rest of your team just shared with them. Create a bulletin board in your room to post the photos, and give each individual a copy to keep. It’s a great exercise to build up trust and excitement among your team. And it’s something that you, and everyone else on your committee, can look back to for inspiration when they're facing a tough day in the yerd world.

Drive Your Message Home

The first goal of setting up a positive environment is to enhance your committee’s work productivity and camaraderie, but it’s also a tool you can use to recruit more members to your team! Make sure you’re sharing the fun photos you take during this exercise on social media and on your Treering community pages. Although the members of your team will naturally talk about how much they enjoy being part of the yearbook committee, this is an extra way to get the message out to a wider audience of students and parents. And that’s one more step in the right direction to attracting the best new members to your team!

Build Trust in Your Yearbook Committee

Part of your role as the adviser to the yearbook committee is to help create a sense of team and trust among the rest of your crew. Exercises like this one are a simple way to spread some positivity, which translates to a more productive and energized team. Not to mention that the more your team thinks about all the things they love about their fellow committee members, the more they’ll enjoy the experience of working with you all! So put this particular exercise to work, and then seek out a few more that will help your yearbook committee bond. With a little help from their fearless leader (you!), each of the individuals you’ve recruited will be working together like a well-oiled machine in no time!

The first day of school is just around the corner. And that means you need to get prepared for your first big photo opportunity of the year! Each fall, the first week of school is a bit of a rush--and it  definitely goes by in the blink of an eye. Preparing now for what you’ll need to capture the best images for your yearbook as students arrive back at school is essential. Below, I’ll walk you through the three biggest steps you need to take over the next week or so to prepare for that first day of school. And they’ll definitely leave you ready to start the new school year with your yearbook committee on the right foot!

Get Brainstorming

To capture those awesome first-day-of-school shots, you need to have some cool ideas in mind before the big day arrives. If you can, get your yearbook committee together in the weeks before school starts to brainstorm some of the most important memories that are made on that first day of school. Those are exactly the moments you want to nab, so that they can be commemorated on the pages of your book! Often, there are traditions that your school has on the first day of school--perhaps a parents' breakfast, coffee and donuts in the atrium for the students, or a fun welcome back celebration. You’ll also want to grab some candid shots of students as they enter the school, or perhaps grab some quotes about what students are excited for at the end of their first day back. When you have a list of photo ops in advance, you’ll be much more likely to grab the best shots for the final pages of your book!

Lay Out Your Props

Like any photo shoot, your first day of school picture opportunities can be made even better with a few props. When you get your committee together to brainstorm photo opportunities, don’t forget to include some time to think about any props you’d like to include on the big day. This could be a small, stuffed version of your school’s mascot, a chalkboard frame that you can write a student’s grade on as they’re entering the school, or even a giant pencil to depict their return to academics. Then gather those props and bring them to school before the first day arrives. This way, you won’t be running around trying to gather everything up at the last minute, potentially missing great picture opportunities on the first day of school because you’re running late or frazzled.

Prep Interview Prompts

Finally, make sure you have your interview prompts ready to go if you plan on conducting any interviews for the content in your yearbook. These prompts could include:

• What students did over the summer: include a feature that covers how much fun the kids at your school had on summer break.
• What they’re most looking forward to: at the end of the first day back, interview students to ask what they’re most excited about in their new grade.
• What they’re wearing: create a fun mini-fashion feature, since students are often dressed their best on that first day back in the classroom.

If you have your prompts ready to go before the first day, you can create unique and interesting features that go beyond the normal back-to-school questions, like “what did you do to get ready for the first day of school?” And when you create interesting content that students aren’t expecting to see, you build more interest for your book as a whole.

The First Day of School

While there are many important days throughout the year that you want to capture, the first day of school is one of the biggest. Students look forward to reconnecting with their classmates, and getting back into a routine. By thinking about the content you can create out of this  big day at your school in advance, you ensure that you cover all of its most important aspects. From traditions on your campus to just checking out what students did over the summer, it’s the perfect time to kick off your school year, and your yearbook, with a bang!

We know that sometimes it takes a little convincing to get yearbook committee volunteers to sign on for the extra work a yearbook committee position involves. So we’re here to help you give your team members the gentle nudge they might need. Here is our handy, free Yearbook Committee Sign-up Form. It includes descriptions of the positions that will help your committee succeed, plus the time commitment each requires. And, of course, space for people to sign up! Because, as anyone who has been part of a yearbook committee knows: It’s one thing to join the committee. It’s another to take on major responsibility. How should you use this sign-up form template?

• Customize it, print it out, and pass it around at your first yearbook committee meeting.
• Keep it in Google Doc format, and link to it in a back-to-school email that promotes your yearbook sale--with a reminder that there won’t be a yearbook without community support!
• Set up a yearbook table at back-to-school night. Have the Editor-in-Chief (or another representative) there to answer questions and prompt attendees to sign up.
• Hit up your PTA/PTO meeting, and use the form to recruit new committee members.

You’ll be surprised by the impact a little guidance--and peer pressure--can make.

  It’s almost August, and that means it’s time to start preparing for the upcoming school year--including for your yearbook, where you'll need to start planning out what you’ll include on the pages of your book. Then you can start getting your top tasks in order, which will help your committee stay organized in the fall. While this might sound like a ton of prep work, remember that everything you do now will make the projects you tackle with your committee during the school year go much smoother. That means you’ll need less time for yearbook prep--and be much less stressed--when the first few weeks of the school year roll around. And with a little help from your favorite Treering expert, you’ll have your projects laid out and organized, and be back to summer fun before you even know it!

Identify Your Features

To start, lay out the major features and articles you want to cover throughout the year. This doesn’t need to be a detailed account of what you’ll include, just a basic list of your sections, and the major features you absolutely must include in your content. You can begin by using last year’s yearbook as an example. Go through and make a list of the sections you definitely want to include in this year’s publication. This will make up about 90% of the features you include in next year’s book. And for that remaining 10%? Well, that can be brainstormed with your committee once everything starts, and can be solidified as events and unexpected stories arise during the school year. This process helps ensure that none of the basics fall through the cracks once you get started on all the exciting special features. It also helps you dole out tasks to your committee from day one, ensuring all the big pieces get apportioned fairly.

Organize Your Thoughts

Now that you have this list, you need to find a way to get--and keep--your yearbook sections super organized from the first day of the school year. As I often recommend, a Google spreadsheet can be the perfect way to do this. Not only is it easy to access on the go, but you can share it with your committee without constantly sending files back and forth, keeping everyone on your team in the loop with content ideas, next steps, and a reminder of who’s tackling each project. To start, just create a tiered document (or use ours as a template) to track your ideas for each of your yearbook sections. Columns for the article status, deadline, and who is responsible for the content will help keep you organized once the season kicks off. Remember, you don’t have to fill in each of the columns now. This spreadsheet simply creates an organized direction for your content that you can work from in the fall. This tab may look very similar to your master calendar, and feel a bit redundant. But it serves an important purpose--by grouping articles by topic, rather than timeline, you're providing yourself with an overview of all your content, in similar sections. You can see the status of all class pages, all sports pages...and make sure nothing gets left out (a friend of mine has their Speech and Debate team completely left out of their published, finalized yearbook this year--an oversight that could have been caught with a spreadsheet like this!).

Prioritize Your Yearbook Sections

Next, prioritize what needs to happen first. To make this simple, there's a column in your content spreadsheet that lists out due dates for each of your features. This will give you an idea of what needs to be completed immediately. As you identify due dates, add each piece of content to your master calendar. As you complete each feature, make sure you highlight it, or make it glaringly obvious what's been completed and what still needs work (A 'red-yellow-green' color-coding system might help, as might strikethrough). This will ensure that articles don't slip through the cracks, leaving you in a rush to complete them just before each deadline. And if you don’t have due dates for all of your features, don’t fret: you can always fill them in once the school year starts!

Prep Now for an Easy School Year

While summer is a time for teachers to take a break and relax, you can make your school year go much more smoothly when you do a little prep work for your yearbook process in advance. A few hours of your time now can help you get in the right mindset, and also create motivation for your committee from the moment you step back in the classroom. And that will definitely translate to a more organized process for your content, and more inspired articles for the pages of your book.

To develop a yearbook that’s beautiful, creative, and well thought out, you need to cultivate an environment that helps your committee focus and produce innovative work. One of the best ways to spark creativity happens to be music. Bringing the right tunes to the table is one of the foundational pieces to building that perfect backdrop for your committee to come up with creative yearbook ideas. This is essential if your want to take your book to the next level of greatness. Science explains how music can be used as a tool for creative success, and a great playlist can keep your entire team on track.

Music as a Creativity Generator

There’s been a lot of research done on how music affects the brain, and one of the unanimous conclusions is that adding some fresh music to the background of your workspace can help you focus, and supports your ability to come up with innovative new concepts. It can be especially helpful when you’re stuck at a creative roadblock, and need some inspiration to get over the hump. This is most often referred to as the Mozart effect, referring to the fact that certain types of music can boost your ability to discover abstract solutions to logical problems. Over the years, this theory has been expanded. Researchers have discovered that classical music isn’t the only way to boost creativity. In fact,  listening to music in general can help people to boost their creative energy. To use music in a way that helps your team come up with more creative yearbook ideas, you need a playlist of songs that your committee can listen to at meetings, and while they’re working on their own. Different people respond to different types of music, so try to include a variety of song choices. This will help every member of your committee find the style of music that best helps them work. Expose your committee to a variety of music genres with the playlist you create. Once they’ve learned what kind of music fits their work style, they can either continue to use the playlist you provided, or create their own!

A Playlist to Use

To make your playlist most effective, you want to build in songs from a variety of genres--including ones that you might not listen to frequently. I’ve found that mixing songs with a variety of tempos that offer a somewhat calm listening experience is most effective. When you work on your own playlist, start with some calming classical tunes, add in some jazzier songs, and then throw in some modern hits for good measure. Below, I’ve added a fantastic playlist that you can use at yearbook committee meetings and circulate to your team for them to use when they’re working on yearbook projects on their own.

• Four Seasons - Vivaldi
• Girl from Ipanema - Stan Getz
• Mad World - Vitamin String Quartet
• Colder Weather - Zac Brown Band
• Bach Cello Suites - Yo Yo Ma
• Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien - Edith Piaf
• Rather Be - Clean Bandit
• I Need Your Love - Pentatonix
• Hallogallo - Neu!
• Jolene - Dolly Parton
• The Room of Requirements - Nicholas Hooper
• Mercy - Duffy
• Carry You - Restless Blues Band
• Comin’ Home - City and Colour
• Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol
• The Way I Am - Ingrid Michaelson
• Bach French Suites - Glenn Gould
• Problem - Pentatonix

And if you want to use this playlist for your committee, you don’t even have to go through the hassle of finding every song. You can just circulate the link to this pre-created playlist in Spotify! Just set the playlist to randomly select songs from the list, and get to work. If you find the variety distracting, and instead want to create thematic stations with certain songs as jumping-off points, you can right click on a song in this playlist, and select 'Start Radio.' Now, a customized radio incorporating thematic elements from that song is at your fingertips. Pandora, another free customizable music station, also allows you this flexibility. I often find, on writing days, that a playlist without lyrics works well--and for a modern twist on that, movie soundtracks, acoustic tracks, or artists like The Piano Guy can provide a respite from classical and jazz.

Spur Creative Yearbook Ideas

It’s no secret that the right resources and environment can spur more creative yearbook ideas. Music is a natural way to give your committee some subtle inspiration while they work. Whether you use my playlist or create your own, you can help each member of your team find their “work zone,” and stay focused while they build out your yearbook projects. This is extremely beneficial to the creative process, which will ultimately help you to create an exceptional yearbook!

As you’ve recently experienced, being the person in charge of the yearbook committee can be a slightly intense undertaking. This is never truer than at the end of the school year, when you’re working to get all of your content created, proofed, and added to your template before your delivery deadline. And that means summer break can’t possibly come at a better time. But while you’re relaxing and refreshing your mind during the warmest months of the year, don’t forget to take some time to engage your creative side! Below, I’ve come up with some fun activities that will help you have a great summer, and also give you some engaging new exercises for creativity that you can bring back to your committee in the fall.

Funny Videos

If there’s one thing that can get you laughing, it’s a compilation of funny videos on YouTube. So on those days it's too hot to venture outside (or too rainy), jump online and spend a few hours enjoying cute kittens, adorable babies or people pulling pranks on their significant others. As you find a few that really get you giggling, save them in an email or a spreadsheet that you can refer back to during the school year. While these videos will help you to relax after a stressful publication season, they’re also a great tool for breaking up or starting off a committee meeting with something hilarious when you all come back together in the fall!

Music Playlist

Music is a great way to spur creativity. It’s also an excellent tool to help you unwind. This summer, spend some time pulling together a great playlist of all your favorite music, past and present. Try to incorporate some artists that may be less well-known to your committee, as changing rhythms, tones and timbres have been shown to really engage the creative side of your brain.¹ Personally, I find that a playlist full of songs without words really helps when reading, writing, or editing. This summer, you can use this playlist at the beach, while you’re working on your house or mowing the lawn, or as you’re pulling together your class syllabi for the school year. Then bring your playlist to your yearbook committee meetings to share with your team in the fall!

Practice Exercises

Building creativity--both for yourself and among your yearbook committee--means accessing both the left and right sides of your brain. To really engage your ingenuity, you need exercises that work both sides of your brain at the same time. Here are a few great ones to get you started:

• Look for new ideas: To think outside of the box on a more regular basis, you have to train your brain to look for creative ideas when you’re living everyday life. To make this a priority, you need the right tools to capture ideas on the go. While a pen and paper will work fine, you can also use apps like Evernote and Backpack. Both are easy to access and offer sharing capabilities, making it simple to send new concepts to the rest of your team when you’re out and about!
• Use your non-dominant side: Giving yourself a challenge by using your non-dominant hand in normal activities can stimulate both sides of your brain. Practice writing, catching a ball and picking things up with your opposite hand to get those synapses firing!
• Practice your colors: One way you can start encouraging the right and left sides of your brain to communicate better is through a color exercise. Write down different colors on a piece of paper using a marker of another color. For example, write yellow in a blue marker, green in a purple marker, etc. Then practice reading the name of the color as written. While it may not be the most thrilling party trick, it’s actually much more difficult than it sounds!

Spark Creativity Within Your Yearbook Committee

Taking a break from your yearbook committee during the summer months gives you plenty of time to refresh your mind before coming back to school in the fall. These particular tips are excellent ways to stimulate your creativity and take a break from planning and scheduling, yet they can carry into fall and be tools your yearbook committee will use. So watch some videos, relax to some tunes, and exercise your brain in silly ways. Before you know it, you’ll have a bunch of new ways to get your committee off on an innovative foot in the fall, while also enjoying your summer break!   1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205081731.htm

Although you’ll likely take the month of June to relax and rejuvenate after a long year in the classroom, you’ll eventually want to start planning for next year’s yearbook. One of the tools that you should begin building during these months is a calendar that tracks all of the dates that affect your role as yearbook adviser throughout the year. From brainstorming to editorial due dates to when your committee members will be on vacation, this will become essential to planning your content. Below, I’ll walk you through the most important things to include on your calendar, and how to utilize this important tool for success throughout the school year.

Start With a Project Timeline

Before you build your calendar, create a project timeline in a spreadsheet. This allows you to first  detail out each of the small projects and features that will become part of your publication. Once complete, you can share this timeline with your committee to keep your team on track. As the yearbook adviser, a timeline makes it easier to visualize all of the dates that comprise a specific project or feature, to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. To start working on your own timeline, we have a Google Doc you can use to plan your year! Once your timeline is complete, start adding those dates to your yearbook calendar, so that you’re always aware of what’s coming up across all of the projects your team is working on, with one glance.

Add Important Dates from the School Calendar

As you’re thinking through the specific projects you’ll assign out to your committee, start adding some of the more important school events to your calendar. This includes big fundraisers, the school art fair, sports events, dances, etc. Anything major that you want to cover in the pages of your publication should wind up on your calendar. This helps you plan out who will cover big events in advance, instead of leaving everything until the last minute. You should also include any dates that are important to your committee, so that you can recognize what your team has going on as you’re assigning out content. This includes birthdays, vacations, and events that they’re participating in themselves, and therefore can’t cover. If three of your students are part of the school’s show choir, mark out their major performances. If one of your students is in the school play, make sure you note that on your calendar. This keeps all of your important date information in one centralized location. You can then use this information to plan out a month of committee activities in advance, including who will cover specific stories, knowing who has time to edit content, and more. Once you’ve assigned out content, make sure you add the name of the responsible committee member to each of the deadlines in your calendar--or, better yet, 'invite' them to the event! Now they'll get an email reminder of this event, and can add it to their own calendar, so you know they know.

Include Ideas

If you have an awesome activity or exercise that would be perfect for a specific committee meeting, add it to the “notes” section of your calendar appointment. This helps you stay organized, so that you’re not constantly searching for the sticky note with that great idea at the last minute, or worse, forgetting to use it all together. To add notes to your schedule in a Google calendar, just open up the appointment and add your idea to the “Description” section, then click “Save.” To do this in your Outlook calendar, use the notes section at the bottom of your appointment. Then click “Save.”

A Calendar for the Yearbook Adviser

As the yearbook adviser, you have the most dates and timelines to keep track of. Having this information in two locations--your calendar and your Google Doc timeline--makes your job easier. With your calendar, you can see exactly what’s happening for your publication on a particular day, week or month. Your timeline is more project-specific, so that you can track what’s been assigned out to your committee within each of your features, and help each committee member stay on track with their assignments. Both are important in their own way. By utilizing these two great tools together, you’re sure to be the most organized yearbook adviser on the block. And that translates to a much easier process for pulling your publication together!

Creating a yearbook is no easy task. There are countless components from design and photography to storytelling and marketing. If you're teaching a class, there are documents to write and objectives to obtain. Club advisers also need a starting point. We know no two schools/classes/clubs are alike. You will find ALL the resources you need in a 100% editable format here. Our modular yearbook curriculum is flexible enough to work for any class, and even parent groups, and covers each yearbook topic. Oh, did we mention it's FREE? And CTE-aligned?

Module 1: Getting Started for the Adviser

This first module helps you as the teacher get organized and off to a great start. You'll find templates to help you customize your syllabus, grading rubrics, and so much more. You'll be ready for recruiting, parent orientation, and accreditation in a few clicks.

Module 2: Kicking Off the Year(book)

Set your students up for success. Here they will learn the importance of the yearbook, the purpose of the different roles, and how to work together as a team.

Module 3: Getting on the Same Page

The key to yearbook success is an organized plan. Your students will learn how to build a yearbook ladder, set up their photo folders, and begin assigning spreads.

Module 4: Creating a Theme From Beginning to End

Coming up with a yearbook theme is more than picking colors. Here, your students will learn the purpose of the yearbook theme and how to develop one on their own while applying it to this year's book.

Module 5: Design Makes it Real

Yearbook design is more than making a page pretty. In this module of the yearbook curriculum, students will learn the various elements of design and how to apply them consistently to their yearbook to re-enforce their theme.

https://blog.treering.com/teaching-graphic-design/

Module 6: Raise Your Voice: Yearbook Storytelling

Telling the story of the year through headlines, captions, and interviews can be intimidating when working with limited space on each spread. In this module of the yearbook curriculum, students will have fun removing their fears and getting to the heart of the story.

Module 7: See the Year Through Your Favorite Lens

Level up your students' photography game. By learning some basics in exposure and composition, your yearbook photos will go from standard snapshots to professional, story-telling photographs.

Module 8: Spread the Word & Make Your Yearbook a Sell-out Success

Whether you're using your yearbook as a fundraiser or not, selling and marketing your yearbook is an important part of the yearbook process. Help your students build a marketing plan to reach their sales goals.

https://blog.treering.com/teaching-yearbook-making-a-marketing-plan/

Module 9: Edit or Regret It

Mistakes happen to everyone. With this step-by-step checklist, your students will learn how to avoid as many as possible before sending your yearbook to print.

Using the Free Yearbook Curriculum

Like all things Treering, this yearbook curriculum is flexible. Here's how advisers and coordinators told us they use it:

• Flipped classroom: assign a reading and discuss it the next day
• I Do, You Do, We Do: student editors take a chunk of a module, model it, teach it, and then the class applies it together
• Traditional instruction: plug and play!

You know your students best!

The end of the school year is a great time to start thinking ahead. In fact, right now is the perfect time to recruit students for next season’s yearbook committee! Some of the best ways to reach out to students are through posters in the halls and the use of flyers. While a traditional marketing tactic, there are a few tricks you can use to improve the content you incorporate that will immediately boost your circulation--and the number of students who respond to your query. Ready to get started? Below you’ll find three common mistakes that many yearbook advisers make, and how to remedy them!

Mistake #1: Using “Join the Yearbook Committee” as a Headline

If you title your poster or flyer with what you ultimately want students to do, you lose out on the opportunity to really engage them with how awesome the yearbook committee is. Always start with a captivating headline--just as you would the spreads within your book! You work with a team of students who love to brainstorm--so let's use them as a resource to create a unique title! Try to come up with a headline that draws the reader in and forces them to read more. Questions and bold statements that speak to a student’s wants will benefit you best. For example:

Want to see more of yourself in the yearbook next year?

Looking for a way to meet spectacular new friends?

Need to build a more diverse resume for college?

By coming at your campaign from a “what’s in it for me” mindset of your student body, they’ll immediately be more interested in what you’re trying to recruit them for!

Mistake #2: Weak Call to Action

You might be tempted to close your flyer or poster with a note that students should touch base with you before the end of the school year if they want to join. Or encourage them to email you. These calls-to-action aren't strong enough to spur an immediate response to join your yearbook committee. Instead, add a little urgency to your call-to-action at the bottom of your flyer. You can add a deadline, group size limit or an extra incentive to join today. Some great concepts include:

Hurry - this yearbook committee invite closes June 15!

Don’t delay - we’re only adding five new members this year!

Join today, and don’t miss out on our fun committee outings this summer!

When students are given a timetable to join, they’re more likely to respond immediately.

Mistake #3: No Follow Up

It’s pretty common for yearbook advisers to distribute these types of flyers once, or just hang up one round of posters--and then wait for responses to come in. Because your students are inundated with messages from teachers and other campus groups all week long, you need to communicate your own offering multiple times to really get their attention. So distribute your flyers on three separate days of the week, at varying times of the day. For example, you can hand them out once at the beginning of the day, once during the lunch hour and once as everyone’s packing up to leave. Also, change up the location and message of your posters--catch their eye with something new! After the year is complete, send out an email to offer one final chance to sign up. If you only have parent email addresses, don’t be afraid to use them! They can certainly encourage their child to participate on your committee if they know you have spots available. Plus, connecting with your students in multiple ways drives home your message, and ensures you hit the widest range of potential yearbook committee members.

Flyers and Posters Promote Your Cause

As you’re building out the content that you’ll include on your yearbook posters and flyers, focus on the positive. Use photos of your yearbook committee enjoying the project from this year. The familiar faces will create more of a personal connection with other students. Be sure to bullet out what made this season of the yearbook so successful, from your fabulous brainstorming sessions to how much fun the kids had getting out and taking pictures. Most of all, remind students that working on the yearbook committee means they get to put a little of their own touch on the final publication. Focusing on what’s important to your students will best communicate why the yearbook is a good fit, and translate to a lot more new faces on your team in the fall!