Book Talks

Hello,

I have a group of students that seem to think checking books out of our school library is not cool enough. They want to go to the public library to get their books. This past week, I decided to do some book talks for them during their library class. I found 6 – 8 books in our library that were age appropriate and interesting. I realized that I really did not have enough time to write book talks for all of those books before their class time, so I did the next best thing. I went to the internet and typed in the title of each book and the term ‘book talk’. I found a couple of great sites and printed out the book talks for each book.

I typically use Amazon.com to check out information about books and this is a good place to start. Amazon has summaries of the books and if needed they can be tweaked slightly to make a good book talk. http://www.amazon.com/

One site was Teen Ink. This is a literary magazine for teens and teens write the book reviews. I used one review from this site. If you decide to use this site, read the review and make sure that it is a good fit for your school. https://www.teenink.com/reviews/book_reviews/

My best source the other day was a site that I use personally – GoodReads.com Their reviews/book summaries worked very well for me. https://www.goodreads.com/

In searching for book reviews sources today, I came across some by children on SchoolTube. If you aren’t familiar with SchoolTube, I understand that it is YouTube for scholastic purposes. The ones that I saw were by children and were quite short, so you could show quite a few of them in a short time. I also had the thought that students might decide to create their own book talks and post them. You can also find book talks on YouTube. http://www.schooltube.com/search/?term=book+talks

Scholastic has book talks for their books, too. Each book fair that we host here has a resource section where tons of information and help can be found. Book talks are there, too. You just print out the ones you need. Even if you don’t host Scholastic book fairs, you can type in Scholastic book talks and find them. http://www.scholastic.com/teacher/ab/booktalks.htm; http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/tradebooks/booktalks.htm#discussion

If you wish to either teach students how to prepare their own book talks or make it a bit easier to create them yourself, ALA (American Library Association) has a lesson plan plus template and even a rubric for this purpose. http://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/conferencesandevents/ecollab/lpd/StudentCreatedBookTalks.pdf

By the way, after I gave the book talks, those students came rushing to my table to grab the books I had just promoted. I felt pretty good about that.

Have a great week!

Audrey

PS. For each book talk I used, I copied the source at the bottom of the review both to cite it and to remember where I got it from.

Currently Reading:
A New Song by Jan Karon (Book 5 of the Mitford series)
Gunn’s Golden Rules by Tim Gunn
The Indiscretions of Archie by P. G. Wodehouse
The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell (Audible book)