I hope this episode is going to help you find some great new ways to check in with your student readers without distracting them from falling in love with reading. You can listen below, or on iTunes, Blubrry, or Stitcher.
Check in #2: Book Review Videos
Students spend so much time on Youtube. They’ve got their favorite channels, their preferred teens broadcasting from their bedrooms about gaming, fashion, food, and everything else. Many students even dream of having their own Youtube channel someday and becoming a sensation. Time to channel that energy and interest into reading review videos!
Spend a few minutes sharing bookish channels by young people like “Hailey in Bookland” or “A Clockwork Reader.”
Then ask your students to create their own short videos (one minute or less) introducing their books to potential readers. Invite them to include the elements of a written review – things like what they do and don’t like about the book, what the author’s style is like, how the book compares to other books (i.e. “If you like …., you’ll probably like this book.”). Remind them not to include spoilers, so they preserve the excitement of the reading experience for their classmates.
If you want, share a few easy tips about creating videos for youtube. Talk to them about shooting video in a quiet place, with natural light on their faces. Mention things like framing and making eye contact with the camera.
Either ask them to include a little fancy video footwork in a video editing program like iMovie (if you’re into that kind of thing in your classroom), OR just have them e-mail you their short videos, right off their phones.
What next? Well, you’ve got a lot of options for how to share these little treasures after giving assignment credit to your students.
- You could start a private Instagram channel for your class, with video posts. As long as the video is under 60 seconds, you can post the whole thing to the channel so your students can shop through the reviews for their next book.
- You could save the reviews to a folder on your teacher computer, then share top favorites before reading times in class, providing inspiration for those searching for their next book.
- If you’re able to get the necessary permissions, you could even start your own class book review Youtube channel. Now here is an option with five star authentic audience potential! Your students will love seeing other kids from around the world subscribing to their channel, and you are likely to inspire at least some of them to take their videos to the next level by providing this option.
This is a great, easy way to build in a little accountability and help students share their books with each other. Whether you call it a book pitch, a book talk, a book commercial, or something else, the point is to let students share what they did (or did not) like about their books. Ask them to stand up, show their book, and talk about it for one minute. It’s OK for the student to say they didn’t like it, in fact that’s important if it’s true. Because students listen to students. THEIR favorites are the ones that pass like a bad rumor from kid to kid faster than you would ever expect.
Spread these out over a few reading days. It’s a bit much to hear thirty book pitches in a row – you will get to a point where the kids aren’t really listening any more.
Now, this option does involve a bit of extra work for you. What I would do is retype the reviews for popular books to make the posts. Then every once in a while I would look through and create a linked list in the sidebar to the reviews of the TOP most popular books. Sometimes I would ask students to go to the blog, check out the reviews and top hits, and write a comment replying to one review of a book they were interested in reading (have them screenshot their comment and mail it to you so you know they did it). It was a great way for them to scan through and get a lot of ideas.
You could also highlight some reviews on your projector or smart board now and then, scanning through so they can see how cool their blog is looking and check out the map in the sidebar.
In the end, all these methods for accountability do the same thing. They allow you to get a pretty good idea of who is reading and to give those students some points for doing what you’ve asked them to do.
But they keep the focus on sharing great books, not on checking off the boxes on a teacher’s to-do list. They make your program about reading community, not about looking over anyone’s shoulder to police their reading.
Because in the end, keeping tight control over every read is not the point. The point, my friends, is to see their love of reading growing before your very eyes.
- Fill your library with titles students want to read
- Organize your library with genre labels
- Create themed displays that draw students in
- Put up bulletin boards that draw attention to great books
- Check in with readers in fun and engaging ways (like all the ones featured in this post!)
- Inspire students to go above and beyond requirements with reading contests, games, and certificates
2 Comments
Like these. When you get accountability and community in reading response, you get two for the price of one. In middle and high school, I love using online book clubs with one post and two comments on others' posts were day. It's quick and easy for the teacher to jump in with a question or comment as well.
I love the idea of book review videos. It gives kids a chance to conference and provides accountability with less of the performance anxiety. Plus, then they could share their review videos with each other. I love the opportunity for digital interaction here.