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.

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!