Reflections on Alternatives to Book Reports

 Doing the alternatives to book reports this week reminded me what a good practice it is for us as teachers to go through the process of what we want our students to do. Both of the projects I chose are deceptively simple. I was responding to my books with pictures (scrapbook) or words (word cloud), but they both took me a considerable amount of time and thought to complete. Even the process of choosing which project is appropriate for a particular text takes a sophisticated level of understanding of what the author is doing in the book. Both of these projects are appropriate for multilingual learners and are excellent examples of how students can demonstrate complex thinking and rich interaction with a text without writing a typical book report. Both of these projects would be excellent to use a group projects or activities for instructional conversations as they are open ended and creative in nature. The completed projects could also be used for class presentations or to spark further discussion. I am looking forward to using these alternatives to book reports in my classroom with my students next year!