I’m always looking for that “perfect” reading book - the one that is just challenging enough for my child, but not too overwhelming.   Maybe I’m a little too picky, but there always seems to be something I would change or write differently.  And because every child is different, I can’t always find what I’m looking for.

In the past I have sometimes resorted to writing my own books for my children - containing words that they need to practice, information on advanced subjects written at a level they can comprehend, or even books that reinforce a certain life lesson they are struggling with.  I used to create these little books by either entering the text into a Word document (the results were rather boring) or entering into a PowerPoint presentation so they can flip through the pages.  I knew there had to be a better way.  So I searched for one…

The Big Universe author tool lets you “Bring out your creativity, improving your writing skills, or just have fun writing a book together with your child or as a classroom project. You can even publish your creation to share with friends and family! The Big Universe Author™ tool (found in the ‘Create’ section) is a highly sophisticated yet simple and fun tool that enables users to create their own picture books. You can then publish your book on BigUniverse.com.”

My youngest son (age 6.5) and I tried this free web-based tool and wrote our own book!  Big Universe offers a very robust image library, many page backgrounds, the ability to manipulate text size and font style, and lots of other easy-to-use features.  You can even use your own digital images as illustrations in your book!

While the authoring tool was very easy for me to use, my 6.5 year did require a lot of help.  Part of this was because there were so many choices - he wanted to use all of the images and write about everything! Once we narrowed our topic down and made our choices, he sometimes needed help with text placement and choosing which images would be on top of the others (for instance, the background image needs to be placed behind the text and character image).  I would recommend working on this as a parent-child activity for any child under 12 years of age.  Overall it was a very fun activity and my son was extremely happy with the results.  I know, you’re eager to read our book aren’t you?

Click on the link below to read the book we wrote - The Best Dog in the World

I plan to use this tool often, as a project to do with my children or to create books customized for their reading level and interests.

If you aren’t ready to write your own books, Big Universe still has lots to offer. At last count, their online library had 639 free online children’s books! They offer a large selection of professionally published children’s books that you can read and then purchase online.  They also have an ever-growing number of user-written books, similar to the one my son and I wrote. When you sign up for a Big Universe account you can also give each booking a rating and make comments on the books.

Check out a few of the free online books in Big Universe’s professionally published books section:

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you and your child decide to author a book on Big Universe, please be aware that once you submit your book, it is required to go through an approval process before it is visible to others on the site. This is a safety precaution to ensure that the book content is appropriate for children. Once we submitted our book it was approximately 48 hours before we received an email stating that our book was available for other Big Universe users to read on the website.

If you and your child author a book on Big Universe, please respond in the comments section and provide us with a link to it so we can all take a look!