Reviews

For the next few days we are going to work on writing book reviews. As soon as we finish these book reviews we are going to get back to the poems. I have been working on making comments on the poems and the students will get them back this Wednesday. So far the poems are amazing!

I love reviews. I eat at a lot of restaurants and nothing beats getting a good review from my brother before I head out. One of my favorite things to read is music reviews and book reviews. This week I wanted to share that joy my joy of reviews with the students.

Today in class we looked at six different book reviews. The class visited the six different reviews in groups thinking about what they noticed. We had a book review for Half a Chance and Absolutely Almost.

We also looked at some book reviews for some books that we had not read. As the students toured the book reviews, they took notes. The class had a T-Chart that allowed them to keep track of what all the book reviews had and what some of the book reviews included that they loved. 

The class made an amazing list of what they found. They noticed that book reviews included:

• titles
• authors
• brief summaries
• a challenge
• a favorite part
• a quote from the book
• a challenge at the end
• a question lead
• a sound lead
• and on and on and on

I am always impressed when I just ask the students to tell me what they notice. We are going to take these observations and use them to help us create our own book reviews. Over and over I tried to get the students to understand that we were doing the work of real authors. 

Real authors always read and notice examples of what they are going to write. I think this is more obvious to the students in these quick writing units. In our poetry unit we looked at tons of poetry. I think the students do not always realize how much that poetry is affecting their writing. Believe me though when I make their comments this week I can see the influence that poetry had on their work. Hopefully this quick writing unit will hammer home that idea that if you want to create a piece of writing one of the first steps is to find exemplar examples of that type of writing. Then use those examples to help you create your piece. 

I hope your week is off to a great start and if you want to leave me any restaurant reviews please feel free.