Summer reading – time to brainstorm
Mar 27th, 2011 by Cathy Jo Nelson
Once before, in an effort to increase participation in summer reading, we created a short promo video for summer reading. We had animoto style the state book award nominees as part of the promo. We planned to reward students who could provide evidence of reading with a Limo ride to a neighborhood book store, a giftcard to buy a book at a certain value, and lunch at the local pizza place. Students had to register to get in on the gig–and the registration was a promise/commitment/contract type agreement to read over the summer. The statement included a lot of ways to demonstrate they had read, including creating posters, book reports, participation in the schools reading blog, making podcasts, making videos, creating a diorama, and much more. The thing was not everyone likes to do book reports or take a test, so we had to have a wide variety of ways to show that the books had been read. There was even a choice of visiting the librarian and verbally telling about a book. Could kids cheat? Absolutely. But that is not necessarily something that could be checked. I’m sure we could have included foolproof ways to identify and eliminate the cheaters, but hopefully only the real readers signed on! I mean the prize was primarily getting a book to read, but in a special way. The field trip was an after school event too. Writing this has made me want to revisit this idea at school. Thanks for prompting my reflection again.
New ideas??
Recently I read about a couple of sites that can be created to mimic Facebook. These could be choices for students to show they have read as well. Creating a FB page for a book character would really be challenging if the book has not been read. (But truth be told, this could be a collaborative effort as well, and cheating could be done in this avenue as well.) See screenshots here below, and the images link to the sites that generated them:
Screenshot of a "MyFakeWall.com" page
Screenshot of Fakebook http://www.classtools.net/fb/home/page
What ideas can you share? How have you encouraged your kids to read over the summer?
I am a future teacher, and just had a quick question? I love the idea of these projects! Do you think these projects or discussions work better than a test? Whenever I enrolled in an English Honors class, I would have to take a test on the book when the school year started. Do you see better results with the projects?
Thanks!
I have found that required summer reading sometimes breeds resentment in students who particularly are not readers for pleasure. I understand why teachers make the assignments, and I see a rush of kids each August and Dec/Jan trying to check out the books on their list, so the practice of testing on the required reading is still a common practice, even in my own high school. Will these projects encourage more reading? I don’t know. But I do think that when students have a wider choice (in reading selection and in ways to demonstrate meeting that objective of reading) they are more inclined to participate. I don’t beleive a test is the be-all end-all way to prove reading occurred. Students have a wide array of talents, and by offering them interesting and engaging alternatives to a test may generate enough interest to get the job done. It also may help a high school student who is still struggling to define themselves or figure out what they want to do beyond high school develop that insight, all because they had some choices in how to demonstrate meeting an objective. I hope I answered your question here.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Alan Liu (Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/ ) and his ROSE (Research Oriented Social Environment), but ROSE is an on-going project that seeks to create profiles and FB-like walls for authors. http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/rose-research-oriented-social-environment-uc-santa-barbara/ He spoke at USC’s Center for Digital Humanities last fall.