Creating and using custom books and texts is a powerful yet often underused activity for teaching language and literacy to all learners, including those who use AAC. When we create custom texts with a learner, we can incorporate that learner’s interests, personal experiences, and ideas to deliver instruction that is personally relevant and highly engaging.  
In this session, you will explore how custom books and texts can be used as an engaging activity to support the language and literacy development of your students. Though custom books and texts can be created using either paper-based materials or digital options, this series will focus on how the features of open-ended digital text creation tools and websites make them ideally suited to following a student’s lead. After exploring the many benefits of using custom book and text creation activities with your students or clients, you will learn about adaptations you can make within those activities to accommodate for a variety of student needs. A link with access to all resources discussed in the session will be provided. 
Be sure to catch part two of this series where you will learn about a set of free and low-cost digital text creation tools and how to use them with your students in fun and engaging ways. 
Objectives: After attending this session, you will be able to: 
1. Describe three benefits of using custom books and texts to support language and literacy development. 
2. Name three elements of a custom book or text.
3. Explain how and why you might remove the background of photos before including them in custom books and texts.