A Twist on the Ole Book Report 

In our school, we do the Daily 5 but I’ve found that during their Work on Writing, students rarely write anything that pushes them to grow. I’ve introduced the 6-traits of writing and the writing process to them, and still my 4th graders weren’t producing anything beyond comic strips. I finally had to step in and assign a writing assignment so that they were challenged to grow. Enter the Book Report.

But book reports aren’t very exciting and I wanted them to feel enthusiastic about this assignment. So I  put a twist on it, calling it The Battle Of The Books.  They were sold! In order to get them reading a Just Right book, I helped with their selections, which they had to read and discuss with a partner. After they were finished reading the book, they had to decide whether someone should or shouldn’t read this book, providing arguments for their case. Convincing others was the Battle!!

Since we have a 1:1 classroom, I also wanted to include such me technology into their presentation of their book reports. I thought a polling or voting app might do the trick. After researching and inquiring with colleagues, I decided on Plickers. It turned out to be a great choice, as it was easy to use and students got instant feedback. This app uses something like a QR code and there are 40 unique codes that you can assign to students. The students answer questions based upon how they are rotating the code. On the Plickers’ cards, they have  an A, B, C and D on them, so the rotation corresponds to the letter.

We invited students from the 2nd, 3rd and 5th grade to listen to my students presentations. It was an awesome experience for them. You can see a glimpse of it below: