Tag Archives: blog

Inspire Summer Readers

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I’m lucky. I admit it. With the exception of a few, my students love to read.

I’d like to take credit for their reading – but the credit belongs to the students themselves. They share books with each other. They talk about what they are reading and make recommendations to peers. Many have a stack of books to read that is as big as mine.

My job, then, is to become a catalyst for book talks. The goal is to continue the “community of readers” into the summer. Here are some ways I’ve offered up to my students:

Make a Book Review Blog Post Schedule

All my students have been allowed “contributor” access to the class blog. They’ve all subscribed to the feeds. I ask for student volunteers to sign up to write posts on certain days. They can use book reviews of books as mentor texts.

One of the great things about blog posts is the comment feature. Students can continue to create a book community by responding to the posts their classmates have written.

Create a Closed Shelfari Group

If you have your own Shelfari profile, you can start a “group” of readers. This group of readers can be private – see the setting options below. 

The downside of Shelfari is the rather obvious advertising. That said, many of my students read via Kindles – so the Shelfari group makes for super-easy ordering.

Have you set up a Shelfari class group? How has it worked?

BiblioNasium

A Shelfari-like social media book club for children, BiblioNasium is now in Beta test. It is more secure than Shelfari – only open to teachers, parents, and students. Students do not need to register with email addresses. Once you create a class, students will be sent a login and password.

There is no easy one-click ordering of books – which may be good news for parents’ credit cards. Teachers can email parents with individual student challenges. Many of my students’ parents would respond well to such differentiated reading “homework”.

Another great feature is that you can manage book lists and search for books according to Lexile, Guided Reading, DRA, and Reading Recovery levels . The site allows you to print out reports of who reads what.

The database of titles is extensive. I plugged in some of the higher level books (Eragon, Warriors, and Titanic) as well as some medium-level fifth grade books by Mary Amato and Andrew Clements.

In the spirit of Teach Paperless, the site “About” page states: Students can email you their reading logs instead of handing them in on paper; you can set up fun challenges and rewards that will help encourage your students to keep reading, and you can set up a reading list that the students won’t lose. It brings the whole classroom together and gives the kids a chance to easily recommend books to each other.

I suspect I’ll be testing this out in the Fall. I hypothesize that students will keep up with their reading logs better if they believe they are “socializing” instead of logging.

If they could only find a way to feed this into Edmodo…

Schedule Skype Book Club Chats

It’s no secret that my 5th grade students spend time on Skype. When I asked students about their book club project work processes, many said they had multiple Skype chats about books. Since multiple people can be on Skype at the same time, groups of students  can schedule impromptu book clubs.

The downside of the Skype option is that students need to share private Skype addresses with one another – and possibly you. Most of my international school students have already done so. Also, students may ask teachers to join their chats. Such an option may not be permissible in some school districts. Ideally, students host and run book clubs without teacher intervention.

Picasa Picture Album: Classmates Reading Worldwide

Start a summer Picasa album that allows students to post pictures. Students post pictures of themselves, faces hidden by the open book, reading in their summer locations.

Since faces are hidden by books, internet safety is in place. Also, students can guess which classmate is behind the book. I ran the idea by my students this morning – and they were really excited. They then asked if they could post pictures of their travels (with no faces or names) attached to poems or captions of their activities. Ummmm…..yeah. That’s like asking, Teacher, can we write?

Picasa pictures may be added to a Google map, giving classmates further clues as to their classmates’ identities.

Students without computers or internet access can get ideas from the Quirky Momma Kids Activity Blog.

Have you shown students your own participation in a book club? Your stack of “books to read”? How do you keep the “book club buzz” going through the summer?

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Inspire Summer Writers

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End the year strong – advice often written and shared.

Yes, there is a natural break from regular school schedules - but when we use the phrase end of school, are we unintentionally signaling to students that it is the end of learning for awhile?

In the final few weeks of school, our job is greater than “finishing strong”. Our job is inspiration.

Students Bloggers

Students with blogs are the easiest to inspire. My questions to them are twofold:

  1. What do you want to blog about this summer?
  2. Have you created a blog schedule?

One of my current students is moving in the next few weeks. Her passion is her dog. She has decided to begin a new blog from her dog’s perspective – how the dog wonders about the boxes and unusual human behavior. This same student is writing a letter to an airline, asking for pictures of the area in which her dog will be when he travels across the world by plane. The pictures will help her better write about air travel from a dog’s perspective.

Another student blogger liked the dog idea. When I asked her, What is your passion?, she immediately said “horses.” She decided to write from her horses’ perspectives.

One student wants to be a food critic. He is traveling Europe and plans to try and rate the local foods. His meals and thoughts will be recorded using a camera and a notebook then transferred to a blog when he gets within a wifi zone. This student will use newspapers and magazine food critic articles as mentor texts.

Scrapbooks and Notebooks

While on the Hong Kong Walkabout, many students developed an interest in photography. They plan to keep scrapbooks full of pictures, writing captions and noting interesting moments.

One girl is going to Alaska. I showed her pictures of Jean Craighead George’s writer’s notebook, featured in Speaking of Journals.

A good number of students want to take travel moments and turn them into personal narratives or poems. Those who were taken with the idea of a 25-word story plan to write a series of those during the summer.

Cookbooks

In the most recent writing unit, a student compiled a cookbook of the best cupcake recipes. Every day for a series of days, she brought in two versions of the same type of cupcake. Classmates would rate the cupcakes based on moistness and flavor. They also made comments that will be compiled into a review. The review will look much like a mentor text blog, but she will cite recipe books and note alterations made to recipes rather than reviewing specific restaurants.

Family

Since expat students live overseas, family members can change dramatically from one visit to another. One student plans to write about how family members have changed over the past year or more.

One boy recently found out his grandpa had passed. He will write down the stories that family members share as well as personal memories of his grandfather.

Culture

Another student, an American passport-holder, is visiting America for the first time. She wants to describe ways in which America is different than Hong Kong. Her passions are media, art, and music, so I suspect her writing will focus on those in particular. Her summer notebook will be filled with sketches and notes about observations.

Finishing Bigger Projects

A few students want to write novels. They wrote a chapter or two during the school year but would like to add chapters over the summer.

Some students have written feature articles about sharks or soccer teams. They plan to add, respectively, more pages about sharks and famous soccer players.

To-do Lists and Calendars

Thomas Edison had a “To Do” list. While celebrating a year’s worth of writing, consider asking students what they’d like to write over the summer. Help them make a list and develop a calendar. Then, make a place where students can post their writing (a Google map or a class blog).

What is on your to-do list? What can you model? Your model may be one of the greatest sources of student inspiration.

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