In the finale of this unit, we want to encourage students to find more great books that they love. In this activity, students will have a chance to promote one of their favorite books.
Introduce the activity by giving book talks on the Mercy Watson books. Lead a discussion about the types of things included in a book talk. You might want to include:
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Title
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Author
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Exciting part
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Hook to get them interested to Read
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Don't Give it Away!
Here is a sample Booktalk I did!
Students will begin by watching segments of Reading Rainbow episodes. At the end of each episode, young people give short book talks to encourage other children to read books. These will providwe additional book talk examples.
You can find Reading Rainbow on video at most libraries and there are also episiodes online at resources such as Safari. It is only the tail end segment that we are concerned with.
Have students choose a book that they want to encourage others to read. Have them plan a booktlak in writing first. Go through several peer and teacher revisions and edits.
Allow students to practice giving their booktalks to one another.
When they are ready, use a digital video camera to film students giving theirbooktalks. The library provides a perfect setting!
The example here was recorded with FLIP video, but any digital video camera will work out fine. Once the video clip is downloaded to a file on your computer, however your camera instructs you to do so, you are ready to go.
One way to display the videos is through the use of powerpoint. In the "INSERT" menu, choose insert Movie or sound. Insert the video file and it will be placed on your slide. You can also add a photo of th ebook and a title and background. This way you could put several together for a class video.
It might look like this....
One note, to show the powerpoint with the video in it, the powerpoint file AND the original video file need to all be saved in the same folder. One easy way to do this, when you are all finished, is to save it to a CD.
Here is an example of Sean's Booktalk. I could not upload th eentire powerpoint with the video because the file is too large. Here is the text, and the video seperately. The screen shot above, shows hoe they could be placed into powerpoint.
