Why Write a Book Report

Writing a book report can be a lot of fun...the first time. Some articles I have read suggest that students may write up to 50 book reports in the 12 years they are in school. This could get really boring quickly!! 

This blog is designed to mix things up a little bit. Lets add technology to something we are already doing!  Creating a book report using a plethora of different publishing ideas can be a lot of fun and educational for students.  It gives them  a chance to read a new book and then tell their teacher and friends what they thought about it.

In this blog I have taken a book that I am sure most of us know, Charlotte's Web and used the information to create a variety of different mediums to create book reports.

5e Annee - Education Photo Book

5e Annee - Education Photo Book

Animoto

Animoto is a web application that produces video like trailors from photos, videos and music. What a fun way to do a Book Report! Students can spend one or two periods "harvesting" pictures that relate to their book. For Charlotte's Web, I made a folder in my "Pictures" folder entitled the same name as the book. Then I went to Google Images and typed in Charlotte's Web. I made sure to right click on the pictures and click on "Save Picture As". I find "copy" works 50% of the time, but fails 98% of the time :)
Animoto can be fanickity. (Is that a real word, or one that just my mom uses) It appears to only like JPEGs. So when you are looking for good pictures, double check that they are not copy righted and jpg!

When teaching Animoto, I usually give a quick reminder about using "legal" images.

For Charlotte' Web I downloaded images of: author, setting, main characters, problem, solution (without giving the story away) and a rating out of 5 stars.

Tumblebooks

Tumblebooks.com is a reading website where thousands of books can be found. These are books that can be found in libraries and bookstores (not just made up for the website), and you can choose to read them directly on the website, or have them read out loud to you. There is some animation on some of the books, but it is all using the existing illustrations from the book. Students can flip through a virtual copy of the book while it is being read out loud to them.
Tumblebooks is not a free site, however they do offer free trials to allow users to see the features available. With a school license, schools are given unlimited access to the Tumblebooks Library from school or home. This means that teachers can use it at school as a reading tool, and then students can go home, login with the school`s username and password, and have access to the same books and resources that they had at school. This is a huge value-added feature as it allows parents to use the features of the website, without having to purchase their own site license.
Some other features of the website are a search tool (to look for that particular book you want to hear), a favourites tab, puzzles and games that are related to specific books that you have been reading, read-a-long books, non-fiction books, and books specifically set up to work on the iPad. In addition, there are some books in other languages, however this is currently somewhat limited.
The collection of books and activities in the Tumblebooks Library is constantly growing, allowing students to read more and more books that they have not read before. This website comes highly recommended from Literacy Support Teachers as well as K-3 classroom teachers. Headphones are a must for use of Tumblebooks!

Shelfari

At the very bottom of this blog I have added a "Shelfari" book shelf. I would recommend a couple ideas with this internet idea. Students could make their own shelf. Add all their favourite books to the shelf. Also, students could write a review, through the Shelfari website, on one of the books on my shelf. I think this would be a great idea for a classroom teacher to keep a "shelf" of the class's favourite books.

Scroll down to the bottom of the blog and see if you recognize any of my favourite books!

Publisher Accordion Book Project

In Publisher, I scrolled down to the greeting card section. From there I chose the 1/4 top fold card. The program will default by giving you 4 pages. I clicked insert to add an additional 4 for a total of 8. I inserted a text box on each page. The students can easily do this in grade 3. Next we inserted a picture. The keener students that are finished early can also add a border around each page. This is done by clicking on the rectangular tool. Place a rectangle around the area that you would like to have the border. Now right click on the rectangle. Scroll down to 'Format AutoShape' In this screen you want to click on 'Border Art'. Press ok twice and you have a beautiful border.

Prezi

Prezi is a new program that was launced in 2009. It is a great way to present material. I prefer it over PowerPoint presentations because students are forced to do more presenting. There is nothing more boring than reading from you slides in PowerPoint.
Prezi’s stated mission is to “make sharing ideas more interesting”.
Prezi is a visually appealing presentation software, which can be used by teachers and students. There are free public and education versions, as well as a paid version which gives more options. Prezi has a "zoomable canvas" that can uniquely take the viewers along a visual path of information, and show the viewer how ideas are connected. Prezi also gives you the capability to embed images, YouTube videos, PDFs, and other media into your presentation. You may use a template or create your own original format to organize your ideas and content.

Charlotte's Web on Prezi

Comic Life

I will often use Comic Life with my grade one students...that is how easy it is to use! If you can click and drag a picture, you can make impressive comics! The students found pictures, imported them to Comic Life made the speech bubbles and ta-da! Instant finished product!

Wordle

Wordle is a terrific way for reluctant writers to share the love of a book that they have read. It is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. I typed the name of the book and the main characters 3 times to make them appear larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Tagxedo

With Tagxedo you type in all of the words that you feel are important to re-telling the story.

For Charlotte's Web we typed:

Charlotte's Web award-winning   childrens~book   E.B. White,   Pig   Wilbur Saved intelligent~spider  Charlotte  book    illustrations    Garth~Williams    Novel   story     pig    Wilbur  friendship    barn~spider    Charlotte     Wilbur     danger     farmer    writes~messages        praising     "Some Pig"       let~him~live       Classic    children's~literature            enjoyable            children    slaughter

Words we wanted to keep together in the Tagxedo we seperated with a tildy (found beside the #1 key)  Words we wanted to appear larger we typed more than once.