Book Walk Assignment
One of the hardest and most common questions I get as an educator is, “How do I make my son/daughter want to read again?”Or sometimes I hear parents say, “They used to read so much when they were little, but recently, they won’t even pick up a book.”
As a secondary education teacher, the first thing I try to establish in my classroom at the beginning of the year is a reading culture. In fact, I used to spend the first six (yes, six!) weeks of school in choice reading, just trying to pave a way back to reading for students who had written it off as a boring activity.
But you and I know that reading can not just be written off. It is the very foundation of everything we do.
So then, how do we get kids to be able to sit down to read? Let alone love to read?
Well, you need to find them his/her own right book. A perfect match. This is where the Book Walk Assignment comes in.
Neil Gaiman said it like this: “Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.”
Based on this idea, I developed an activity to help students build “To-Read” lists and build a “reading ladder”, and I call this activity the “Book Walk Assignment”. Here is the editable assignment sheet for your own classroom and rubric.
It is pretty simple in nature but can be unbelievably helpful in building a reading culture in your classroom. You can also do this activity in your own home or for home school if you just want to use the book summaries on the back instead of the report.
Instructions for Teacher:
Each student will bring a color copy of the front cover of a choice book to class. They will answer the following questions below and bring a printed copy to class. They will staple the book cover and answers together or tuck the answers inside the book.
Then, arrange students’ desks in a circle and set a timer for 3 minutes. Have the students pass their report to the person on their left.
Have students read the report/summary of one another’s books. If it looks like something he/she wants to read, then the student will write the title down on a “To-Read” list.
Then when the timer goes off, pass the report and book cover to the left to the next person.
Repeat until the book cover and the report get back to its original owner.
Student Assignment:
Bring a color copy of the front cover of your choice book to class or the actual book itself. Answer the following questions and bring a printed copy to class. For each question, write a 5 sentence minimum response.
Who is your main character? While you were reading this book, did any characters change? How did they change? What forces caused this change?
Is this character similar to any other character you’ve read about in another text? What are the similarities?
What were some of the events that created conflict in your text? What made these things happen? Why?
What is the mood of your text? How does the author create that mood?
What new information did you learn while reading this text?
How did you connect to the text? Was it personal? Was it an issue that affected your community or the world? Explain.
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The Book Walk Assignment can be a great way to kick off your year or to help your students find their next choice book before Christmas Break. The goal of this assignment is to get kids reading something they like and have a “what’s next”.
Book Talks can be really intimidating to a middle school or high school student. So instead, why not take a 3 minute, silent “walk”with a book and see if it might be “the one”?
Some of my favorite stories about kids who fell back in love with reading came from this assignment. Sometimes a bad book is really just a gateway drug to a good book or a soon-to-be reader.
