We want our students to read books they love, and we want them to share their enthusiasm for the book with others. The realities of the classroom, however, require us to set formats and deadlines. Hence, the traditional book report, an example of an idea that looks good on paper but just doesn’t work well in practice.

Web English Teacher’s Book Reports page consistently ranks in its top 10 most-accessed pages. (As I write this, it is #3.) This may be due to the fact that teachers assign book reports at many grade levels. It may also a result of our unending search for creative ways to encourage students to respond to their reading and still demonstrate some critical analysis.

In an earlier blog I mentioned a 10-question interview as a possible book report format. Here, in no particular order, are other possibilities:

• 91 Ways to Respond to Literature
  My personal favorite: the Fortune Cookie Review.
• Alternatives to the Traditional Book Report
  Another collection of creative ways to respond, including “It is income tax time and you’re an accountant making out the forms for one of the characters in your book. Tell how he/she spent money last year. What events support your judgments?”
• Book Party: Creating Festivals to Honor Works of Literature
  OK, it’s not the National Book Festival, but it’s the thought that counts (and the analysis).
• Not Your Same Old Book Report
  Responding to books in 3 dimensions!

Whatever engages kids will work — offer them some choices and get out of the way!

Last weekend I learned about writer Joseph Bruchac. I wish I could say we sat somewhere and swapped stories all afternoon, but we haven’t actually met. I came across his name while Googling for something else and followed it from title to title (to title!) to interview to lesson plan. I’ll say this: he’s a busy guy.

Bruchac is primarily known as a writer of children’s books, which might explain why I haven’t run across him before. According to his site, he has published 83 titles, including picture books, plays, YA novels, story collections, audio tapes, poetry and an autobiography. Some of his best-known titles (at least among teachers) might include these:

• The First Strawberries
• Code Talker
• A Boy Called Slow
• The Arrow over the Door
• The Journal of Jesse Smoke, a Cherokee Boy, The Trail of Tears, 1838

When I’m researching writers who are used in schools, I usually find that, no matter how many titles the writer has published, teachers tend to select one title to use in the classroom. A few writers beat the odds (Beverly Cleary and Gary Paulsen come to mind), but generally schools embrace one title. In Bruchac’s case, though, I found lesson plans for no fewer than 17 of his titles, and there are probably others I haven’t found yet. This is remarkable! The only other author who comes close to this is Shakespeare, for whom I have found lesson plans for 20 plays.

Bruchac draws on his Abenaki heritage — and careful research — to make American Indian people, history, and culture come to life for nonIndian readers. But if his heritage were his only asset, he would fall into the “One Title” category. There must be more to his writing than just the subject matter.

Now that I’ve read so much about him, I want to read something BY him. When I get to school tomorrow, I’m heading for the library.

Have you seen these in your classroom?

• A student whose learning disability requires that texts be read to him or her.
• A student whose first language is not English — the student reads well silently but is uncertain about pronunciation.
• A student who leaves words out of his/her writing.
• A visually impaired student who has trouble reading computer screens.

Support for all of these learners is available through Read Please, a text-to-speech converter. Download the application to your classroom computer and install it, copy and paste text into the box, and then listen to the text being read. It’s really that easy.

The application will require students to listen carefully, since it has a little trouble with homophones now and then. It also resorts to creative pronunciations when it comes across a word it doesn’t know. I typed in “webenglishteacher.com” and it came out “wee-benglish-teacher.com.” (I was impressed that it got the “dotcom” part right.)

There are some drawbacks: first, it only runs on Windows machines. Second, if you’re using the free version (yes — a FREE version!), the voice sounds decidedly machine-like. More natural-sounding voices cost extra. Finally, the site appears not to have been updated since some time in 2004. This bodes ill if you ever need tech support.

Still, this tool offers support to those who most need it, empowering them to work more independently. It’s worth checking out.

Special thanks to Sally for this one!

Jakob Nielsen’s post on banner blindness includes an interesting study on how people read Web pages. Researchers tracked people’s eye movements as they visited sites online and determined that we look at Websites in an “F” pattern. Writing for business owners and Web designers, Nielsen concludes,

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Web users have taught themselves to read this way with remarkable consistency. If teachers want students to read long blocks of text online (for example, an online short story or an essay), we may have to remind them to adjust their reading strategies as they begin.

These studies have implications for the teaching of writing, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Think Aloud is a reading strategy designed to model the way good readers “think through” a text to understand it. It’s often used for remediation in middle and high school classrooms.

Greece Central School District in North Greece, New York, has established a rich repository of instructional strategies and resources, and Think Aloud is one of them.

From the site:

Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers.

This strategy underscores the importance of modeling reading for our students. When I begin “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I use this approach because I know Poe’s style intimidates readers — sometimes even strong readers. It help to pause and think now and then, to reflect and predict. By the time the house collapses, students are comfortable using this approach on their own.