With most of the school year in the proverbial book, we are counting down until summer vacation. End-of-the-year celebrations aren’t complete without a yearbook. If you’re the one wearing the yearbook coordinator crown, it’s time to circle the wagons and quickly create your elementary school yearbook without sacrificing style. We have live webinars Wednesdays and Thursdays to help jumpstart your second semester.
Step 1: Upload Your Student Roster
Your first step is a quick visit to the front office (remember to bring some lattes) to get a community and student roster. This seems tedious. It will save you hours if you do this first. You will easily be able to
- Tag to ensure inclusivity or to create an index
- Start marketing and selling your book
- Receive your yearbooks sorted by your choice of grade, teacher, or last name which will save you tons of time once they arrive
(We promise, you’ll thank us later.)
Step 2: Get the Word Out
With an updated student roster, you can now effectively communicate with your community and launch marketing campaigns that support yearbook building and orders. Examples of communication that will help you build a better book include emails asking for photos, how to purchase books, and special features like creating personalized pages and showing your students/parents how to create e-signatures.
If you really want to ramp up sales and raise awareness of your yearbook project and photo needs, use this month of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter content. There’s also a full marketing module in our free yearbook curriculum.
Step 3: Collaborate with your Community
Following strong communication, you are set up to collaborate on the yearbook with ease. Crowdsource photos from school staff, other parents, coaches, and students.
When possible, assign class pages to others. No yearbook coordinator is an island (or something like that). By building a team, you’ll capture more, include more, and stress out less!
Step 4: Upload Your Students’ Portraits
Whether your elementary school was able to take professional portraits, or you are sourcing portraits from parents, upload these to your yearbook next. Your yearbook provider should have a solution for adding these to your book. You can even use these yearbook spreads to add more content.
Step 5: Build your Book
Now that you’ve connected with your community and begun sourcing ideas and visuals for your yearbook, you’re ready to select and set up your book themes and styles. In addition to designing your own themes, Treering offers a free library of professionally designed themes. Each theme package includes layouts, font pairings, and graphics to tie your look together. You can also 100% customize your own.
Set spreads aside for
- School events such as fun runs and book fairs
- Sports (If your school doesn’t have teams, crowdsource photos of students on their outside sports team)
- Holidays
- Trends
- Clubs
- Class favorites
Build a beautiful yearbook with features like auto-page layouts that magically lay your photos out beautifully on a spread or pre-designed pages that cover the Best of the Year and Year in Review plus student-generated content through fill-ins for a quick elementary school layout.
Step 6: Set Your Yearbook to Print Ready!
Drop the yearbook and walk away. In all seriousness, hit “print-ready” to send your files to the printers and, if you’re using Treering, you’ll quickly have your books in hand in three weeks or less! If for any reason you want a little more time, it’s easy to adjust print-ready deadlines too. As the yearbook coordinator, you’re in charge!
Step 7: Distribute the Yearbook and Celebrate!
All this work is worth celebrating! Work with your parent group to host a yearbook signing party. It doesn’t need to be fancy or cost you additional money; this could be something special like
- Playing music at lunch
- Offering a jeans day to yearbook buyers if you’re a uniform school
- Allowing yearbook purchasers to bring a stuffed animal to school
- Setting up signing tables at a year-end school event
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