I’ve returned to work on site part time this term while I continue to recover from my knee injury, which means that I’m not seeing as many of my Wide Reading classes as I’d like. I’m also not able to plan properly for Book Week, coming up very soon in Week 5. Nonetheless, I do what I can when I can, and here’s a little activity I’ve put together to get kids excited for this years theme: Reading is Magic!
Today I had our Tech Elect class which utilises iPads and other innovative technology tools in their lessons. We’ve previously done a bit of work on reader identity and today I presented them with the prompt “If reading is magic, then readers are …”. They then had to come up with as many metaphors to finish the sentence in 2 minutes as they could. To add an element of collaborative competition, I gave them a QR code to a Google Doc they could edit and assigned each student a team; the team with the most unique metaphors at the end of the game won. I’ve previously run similar games in my classroom by having students line up in two teams and write their answers one by one on a whiteboard, but I thought that would be a bit too much chaos in my already chaotic open-plan library space. After reminding the class about the definition of a metaphor, they were off!
I’ve taken their words and placed them into a word cloud; if you couldn’t guess from the words they’ve chosen, this particular class is completing a novel study based around Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. While some words were disqualified because they were not metaphors (leading to another teachable moment on the difference between a description and a metaphor), there were some interesting discussions about what readers are that emerged from this activity. Plus, I’ve now got their word cloud to promote the program on social media and in my annual report. It took a bit longer than I anticipated (largely due to tech issues around scanning the QR code) but is definitely something I’d run again with another class – maybe by removing the competitive element and using a single word cloud generated by a platform like Mentimeter.
If anyone has a fun activity they’re running to build excitement for Book Week 2024, leave a comment below!