Tonight's homework was to write a book review of indeterminate length on the book of your choice. I started with the idea of who has "liked, kinda liked, or loved" a book before. Virtually every hand goes up. I then asked, "who has thought 'man this book has stunk, or wasn't very good'?" To that a variety of hands went up. Fantastic! Everyone has an opinion, and some people actually get paid to give it through book reviews (not to mention book reviews). I was aiming at relevancy, and think it was achieved when I found some kids (particularly those less included to write/read) got that crooked head, "really?" look!
For me this is a starting point. Who can take an assignment like this and organize it into a piece of writing that makes sense?! Who struggles and needs more scaffolding to make their writing happen? Other items will come out of this too, such as who was really in need of support and tried like gangbusters alone... or who needed that parental support. To each of my groups I prefaced this with don't worry about writing a giant piece, but instead work until you feel finished or feel like you can't add anything. We'll go from there.
Not only does this start some of my writing work, it helps me with content for our online portal. We use a site called Communicator, a secure portal that lets us host an internal site with a blog, wiki, and discussion board function. Book reviews will be central to this. Kids always ask "what book should I read next?" and I often say... "ask a friend." This will be a great way to get kids interested in reading other kids books... and writing for an authentic audience. I am excited!
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