submitted by Kathryn Whitehouse
Some years ago, I performed a volunteer project of creating and administering a California Young Reader Medal contest. I read the nominated picture books to each classroom over a 5 week period-- one book per visit. At the sixth week I passed out ballots. I created paper ballots with color thumbnails of the book covers and I verbally described each book to remind the kids of the story. I collected their votes, tallied them, and announced a winner. It was a fun project for me, and an engaging project for the kids.
Von Drasek repeats this experiment every year for her New York City elementary students, and has never found the experience to be anything less than impactful. Students are thrilled to be consulted for their opinions, bring enlightened discernment to their deliberations, and take ownership of the process. They eagerly await the award announcement to see if their choices matched the award results. But Von Draske sees an even bigger payoff in how these events support the Common Core by encouraging critical thinking. Van Drasek also finds these events an obvious avenue of collaboration with teachers as they use the both the content of these nominee titles ( for language arts and social studies connections) and the voting process (for math and graphing connections) for deep curriculum support. She also finds teachers appreciate working with newer quality titles as a pleasant break from older titles, and are invigorated by their students’ intense engagement. Many states offer young readers’ choice awards (including California). But schools could easily customize an event to support their curriculum and examine nominees from Caldecott, Newbery, Geisel, Belpre, or Coretta Scott King.
If
I were to repeat my previous project and had only one day to accomplish
this activity, I would consider something different. I would employ as
many readers as classrooms. Each reader would visit each classroom to
read his or her book. In an hour, a classroom would have had four
visitors and have had four nominee books read aloud. The students would
then vote using a Google forms survey instead of paper slips. This could
be done on the teacher’s lap top one at a time, or with laptops in the
classroom. The survey results would already be collected and ready for
sharing. On a practical level, it would be done one grade at a time.
But
I much prefer Van Drasek’s less hurried approach for its ability to
impart varied and significant curriculum connections over a longer time
period, and for its ability to sustain young readers’ interest.
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