New book swap
Played a fun game with a couple of classes on Friday.
I was able to place a good-sized book order recently and got all the lovely new fiction books ready to go. On Friday, a 7th grade class came in and sat in a circle. I gave each of them one of the new books. I had them talk about how they evaluate a book and what criteria they use to determine whether a book might be the right one for them. They came up with good answers--the cover, blurbs on the flyleaf and back, whether the author is one they're familiar with, whether the book is in a series they've read, the genre, how hard or easy the vocab seems, etc. All the same things adults do without thinking much about it.
Analysis and evaluation is an important skill at this age. It plays a much bigger part of their writing assignments and, in a lot of cases, thinking about it as a skill we all do is new to them. You'd be surprised how students's thinking changes about this age (12). Some of the 11-year-olds cannot understand that the hardback and pb of the same book (with different covers) are the same. I tell them that every word inside is the same, but they're just not buying it. It's weird how concretely some of them still think. At 12, on average, they become capable of doing a whole lot more.
ANYWAY, as jade would say, I told them they had 30 seconds to look at the book they were holding. At 30 seconds I said, "Switch" and they passed the book to the left. We continued switching books for 15 minutes until they'd looked at 30 books, then they got a chance to check out the ones they liked. It was pretty cool. You could have heard a pin drop while they were looking at the books. They seemed to really enjoy it. I wish they could have had longer than 30 seconds per book but we just didn't have any more time than that.
Ah, new books. How I love you.
I was able to place a good-sized book order recently and got all the lovely new fiction books ready to go. On Friday, a 7th grade class came in and sat in a circle. I gave each of them one of the new books. I had them talk about how they evaluate a book and what criteria they use to determine whether a book might be the right one for them. They came up with good answers--the cover, blurbs on the flyleaf and back, whether the author is one they're familiar with, whether the book is in a series they've read, the genre, how hard or easy the vocab seems, etc. All the same things adults do without thinking much about it.
Analysis and evaluation is an important skill at this age. It plays a much bigger part of their writing assignments and, in a lot of cases, thinking about it as a skill we all do is new to them. You'd be surprised how students's thinking changes about this age (12). Some of the 11-year-olds cannot understand that the hardback and pb of the same book (with different covers) are the same. I tell them that every word inside is the same, but they're just not buying it. It's weird how concretely some of them still think. At 12, on average, they become capable of doing a whole lot more.
ANYWAY, as jade would say, I told them they had 30 seconds to look at the book they were holding. At 30 seconds I said, "Switch" and they passed the book to the left. We continued switching books for 15 minutes until they'd looked at 30 books, then they got a chance to check out the ones they liked. It was pretty cool. You could have heard a pin drop while they were looking at the books. They seemed to really enjoy it. I wish they could have had longer than 30 seconds per book but we just didn't have any more time than that.
Ah, new books. How I love you.