Walking the Red Carpet with Book-of-the-Year Awards, Part 1 + a freebie!

Every year at the end of the school year, my students and I hold an election. We review the major mentor texts that we read over the entire school year. We discuss them. We share our opinions about our favorites and our least favorites.  Then, we vote to elect our Book-of-the-Year for room 9. This year, I decided to ramp it up a bit. As part of our developing culture of thinking, I wanted my students to delve more deeply into our year and the texts we read together.

The Brainstorm

Raise your hand if some of the best teaching ideas you've had occur at the oddest times. This happens to me constantly.  This one was no different.  As I bent over my piece-of-crap lawn mower to pull the cord yet again,  the obscenities clouding my mind parted, and I was struck by an image of my students creating a huge mind map about all ten of our mentor texts.  I saw them drawing arrows to and from text titles to show connections.  I saw them writing and talking about their connections. Then I imagined them writing an opinion piece to defend their choices for the Book-of-the-Year Award.  After I put the lawn mower back in my garage (it never did start---I had killed yet another mower), I sat down at my kitchen table to continue daydreaming. 

Before you read any farther, please know that this "new idea" is just now being explored in my classroom.  This post is not a "Hey! Look what we did!" kind of post.  We are in process.  This week, I began by placing a huge sheet of butcher paper on the floor.  On it, I wrote the titles of each major mentor text we had read over the year.  The titles include: Perloo the Bold, Tuck Everlasting, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Pictures of Hollis Woods, Bridge to Terabithia, The Poetry of Langston Hughes, Coming Home, My Brother Sam Is Dead, Between the Lines, and A Long Walk to Water.

We sat on the floor, surrounding the butcher paper and revisited each text. Our discussions focused on the characters and the themes we thought were important in each text.  Just as I had imagined, my students began to find connections between the texts.  This delighted me. Want to know why? Because many of the connections weren't intentional, and yet as they thought through the entire year, they could see themes and important ideas as common threads. 

I ended this discussion by asking students to choose one mentor text that they wanted to nominate for our Book-of-the-Year Award. Surprisingly, every book was chosen by at least one student.  They returned to their seats to do a flash write about their choices.

What's Next?

This week, I'm really excited about our next steps.  Students will begin to review persuasive writing goals by writing a short persuasive essay about their book nomination.  We've been studying bias in text and discussing how authors use words in certain ways to convince or rile up their readers around a product or cause.  We will be learning to do this in our writing this week!  

We will also be completing our floor-sized mind map about the texts and their connections.  I plan to leave this out in the back of my classroom for students to add to on their own, during our independent reading block.  This will be a huge discussion piece for the end of the week. 

After my kids have written their persuasive nominations, they'll practice reading them using whisper phones in order to be less dependent on their texts when they orally defend their choices.  By the last week of May, we will be presenting our nominations, walking the red carpet with our nominations and voting! Be sure to check back for the update next week!

This week, I'm offering something special for my readers and teacher friends!

Until then, check out the free resource below. It's a sample from the larger collection of resources I'm developing and using to complete our "Red Carpet Awards" project.  The larger resource will be available next Sunday, May 21st.  This week, I'm offering something special for my readers and teacher friends! Download the free sample below and leave feedback.  If you're one of the first 5 to leave feedback and comment on this post OR email me, I will GIVE you the FULL RESOURCE, FREE!

This week, you might also want to touch base with these amazing Teacher Talk authors.  This month's posts are packed full of end-of-year goodness!

   

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