1. The first step in creating your own workbook is to prepare the materials. Many different curriculum providers are selling master copy rights to their curriculums to schools or school districts. This is important since you don't want to break the law or violate copyright law in creating your book. Alternatively, if you have created your own worksheets and curriculum you won't need to buy a license to copy the materials.

2. After you secured the copyright to the materials that you will use in your workbooks you need to find a source for the perforated copy paper. You are going to want to buy copy paper that is perforated approximately 1/2" from the binding edge of the document. If your worksheets are going to be close to the edge of the paper you might want to consider buying 9" x 11" paper so that the worksheet will still be letter size after it is removed from the workbook. This will allow students to easily tear documents out of their booklets. When shopping for perforated copy paper it is important that you buy paper that is guaranteed to run through a copier or laser printer since you don't want to deal with paper jams.

3. Now that you have your master document and the paper you will need to make the appropriate number of photocopies for your students using the perforated copy paper. Be sure to allow your photocopier or laser printer to collate the documents for you so that you don't need to spend time sorting the pages by hand.

4. Finally you are ready to assemble your book. If you are going to use a front and back cover on your workbook you will want to assemble them with your book at this point. Then you will need to bind your books together. For small books you can probably just use a few staples along the binding edge of the document. However, if your workbooks are too large for use with staples you will probably need to consider bind them with comb binding (most schools have a comb binding machine). You could also use other types of binding with your workbooks including Unibind, Thermal Binding, Fastback, Wire Binding, Coil Binding or even Velobind. It really just depends on the look that you desire for your workbooks and the type of binding system that you have available to you.

With these four simple steps you can create your own workbooks for your students and save a lot of money buying expensive curriculum. Even with the cost of the paper and the photocopying you should be way ahead with this method than you would be trying to buy every student in your class their own workbook. Try it for yourself and see how well it works.