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Tag Archives: Book Awards
And the nominees are…
Gentle reader, I need to thank you for your patience. Being a full-time middle school teacher and full-time doctoral student does not afford me lots of free time. While I fully intended to post a new blog discussing my students’ nominations for their book awards, the end of April was wrought with deadlines. And now I find myself in mid-May, wondering where does the time go?
As you know, my seventh-grade students have nominated books for their book awards. I have two groups of seventh-graders, so I have two different awards: The Spectacular Sevie Award and the The Ms. Schmidt’s B3 Class Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Excellent Writing (MSB3CAOAIFEW). The next step was nominating books. Each student nominated one book. I was a bit concerned. Would every student nominate a title? After all, no matter how much I rave, I do have some students who don’t read a lot outside of class. As one of my boys mentioned to me the other day, “The Hunger Games was the first book I read outside of DEAR, Ms. Schmidt.” (He’s now reading Catching Fire and not happy with it because, “They’re just on the train.”) The nominations came flooding in. My fears were unfounded. All the students nominated a book, and some wanted to nominate multiple books. Then I had to figure out how to group books and form “committees.” I didn’t have to figure this out; I just asked the kids how they wanted to handle it.
Posted in Independent Reading/SSR/Reader's Workshop
Tagged as: Book Awards, YA Lit, YA Literature, young adult lit, young adult literature
Awards Season
Gentle reader, as you already know from reading my humble blog, my 7th grade students have been hard at work learning about book awards and creating their own award. As I’ve mentioned previously, I love this book award idea because it gets them to analyze and synthesize information gathered from outside sources, it gives them research practice, it connects to their independent reading, and it has them analyze independent reading books as we did for a whole class novel. Furthermore, I hope it gets them thinking about what puts the good in “This is a good book.”
This week the classes tasks were to create a list of criteria, come up with a name for their award, come up with a nomination process, and begin to nominate books.
Posted in Teacher Tips
Tagged as: Book Awards, YA Lit, YA Literature, young adult lit, young adult literature
Information Literacy Please
March continued to try to beat me down. The weather this week was less than hospitable, but the climate in my classroom was gentle and pleasant.
As I mentioned in my last post, my students are in the process of creating their own book award. On Wednesday of this past week, we moved our classroom to the computer lab. After an information literacy mini-lesson about how to conduct a search, the students were off!
Posted in Teacher Tips
Tagged as: Book Awards, YA Lit, YA Literature, young adult lit, young adult literature