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?
For additional support, join the Teaching Yearbook Cohort to get regular, live pedagogical support for writing, design, and marketing. There are additional, topical webinars available through Treering’s Yearbook Club.
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 accrediation 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.
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.
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!
