Sunday, September 27, 2009

Book Review 2.0

I was approached by one of my eighth-grade language arts teachers at the beginning of the year about book reports. She requires her students to read 2 books per quarter and wanted to try some innovative ways to "track" their reading. So, I created a list of ideas for her (which I hope to blog about later), which she will pull from throughout the year.

For her first book project, she decided to go with Glogster book reviews. Glogster is a very teacher/student-friendly site with a separate education portal. So, we set her up with an account and created her student accounts as well . . . very simple!

In order to help her students write a quality book review to incorporate into their glog, I volunteered to do a 20-25 minute mini-lesson on writing book reviews. I did not feel like an expert on writing book reviews, but I found Steve Peha's ideas very helpful.

Here are the 3 resources I created to help the students learn: (all embedded below)
1. Google presentation - unfortunately the speaker notes do not embed along with the google presentation, so some slides at the end may not make complete sense


2. Handout


3. Example


I am really excited about the direction we are headed. Each quarter the students will have critically evaluated their books utilizing a variety of media. Gone are the days of the standard written book report/review!

2 comments:

C Rod said...

I just wanted to say thanks so much for writing this post and sharing your book review 2.0! I had been planning to have my students create a glog about their SSR novels instead of doing a book report. I teach reading enrichment in Texas and will be using this with my striving readers next week!

Thanks again,

Ms. Rodgers

Miss M said...

I appreciate your comment, Ms. Rodgers. I'm glad that you found my post helpful:)