Book Reports

There can be no clever way to say “book reports.” In the current idiom, they are what they are. Since there is no other way to name them and no hope of overthrowing them, perhaps it would help to adjust what is in them. The following are suggested activities that are truer responses to literature than those customarily found in, did I mention them, book reports. Students may

Recreate scenes in writing by visualizing and feeling into the scenes;

Construct a character web of a character with traits/feelings and examples;

Extract a moral or main theme of the story and explain why it is;

From a list of other books/stories, find the similarities in theme;

Decide what events shaped a character in the story;

Describe some choices/choice made by a character and the effects of the choice(s);

Choose a character from the story and compare him/her to a character from another story, perhaps in a visual “ThinkLink”;

Create a plot design of the story, using from six to ten words;

52Create questions about the story for themselves or others to answer;

Make questions from at least four thinking types;

Answer in writing or visually one of the questions they ask;

“Sell” their book to a partner without revealing the plot.

There are many other possibilities that students could choose, preferably in school, as they respond to literature. Notice, no mention was made of the “mood” of the story or the author’s purpose. Apologies to the testing companies, we may have to choose at times between the lords of testing and true education. However, parents still may have to go to the store late at night for posterboards.