Book Talks (and a Freebie!)

Last year, I transformed my reading program and I absolutely loved the Readers’ Workshop structure that I was able to create in my classroom.  One part of the program that I enjoyed was the book talks I had the kids do.  Each month, the students in my room were required to read at least one book from a specific genre.  After reading that book, they had to give a book talk on the book.

Book talks (or book commercials) are simpler than the traditional book report, and the kids seemed to enjoy both giving and listening to them.  

So what is a book talk?  A book talk is like a commercial for a book that the students have read.  They are not long (only about two minutes in length).  During the book talk, students were asked to share:

* the book’s title and author

* the cover (or a picture of the cover)

* a little information about the characters and the problem in the story

* some interesting information from the book.

I created a handout with the basics of a book talk and a monthly genre calendar to give to the kids to include in their reading binder.  The handout is available in my TPT store for FREE! (link to product)

If you use Book Talks leave me a comment to let me know what they look like in your classroom!

Reading Response Journals

Last year, I started using a Readers Workshop approach in my classroom after reading The Book Whisperer last summer.  I love the approach and found that my students grew as readers and developed a love for reading that I haven’t seen with other approaches.

While I loved the Readers Workshop method, I sometimes had trouble coming up with interesting and different prompts for the kids to use in their Reader’s Notebooks.  My goal for this year is to find more creative response prompts, and this morning I found a wonderful resource for that!  

 

The CaffeinatedLibrarian has a post on her blog called “The Best List of Reading Response Questions Ever” and after reading through the list, I must agree!  I copied the list into a MS Word document and it took nine and a half pages to list all of the prompt ideas!  There are several general prompts, but there is also a section divided into categories aligned to test readiness including: analyze, compare, contrast, define, describe, differentiate, discuss, evaluate, explain, identify, interpret, list, main idea, and outline.

I plan to use several of these prompts in the upcoming year, and hope they can be helpful to you as well!