Bringing Books to Life - Write It!

One of the standard run of the mill things to do after reading a book is to do a book report, right? A regular old book report sounds a little bor-ing!  Why not have a little fun and focus on the joy of writing, especially in the elementary and middle school years.  I am not saying to not correct, teach and guide children in writing, just have a little fun with it.  Adding a WOW-Factor or a little pazzaz is a great way to Bring Books to Life!

Here are some ideas to spice up book reports:

• Instead of a book report why not allow the kids to write a song, rap or poem.  My kids have really enjoyed doing this.  Once they have completed their song and sung it to me two things usually happen 1) I see what they have learned and 2) we all usually have a good laugh and a smile!
• Have you tried lapbooking or notebooking?  We notebook, ALOT!  They usually have a page that they have drawn or colored from what we have read for Bible, history and science.  We also like to do this as we are reading through a book.  There are tons of FREE lapbooking and notebooking pages to get you started on Homeschool Share, which is one of my FAVORITE websites BTW!
• How about allowing the kids to take what they know from the book they've just read and write a sequel or even a different ending. 
• There is a wonderful little book called The Creative Teacher, that I borrowed it from the library.  It has wonderful ideas in there for creative book reports.  One of my favorites is making a Book Report Sandwich.  Basically, you take pages that are shaped like bread, lettuce, tomato, cheese, mayo, and ham to build a report.  Each piece represents a different part of the story like title & author, plot, characters, etc.  Here is a Book Report Sandwich Maker and a Book Report Sandwich template to get you started.
• Another great idea that I got from The Creative Teacher was to make a book report puppet.  You start by taking a brown lunch bag and then make a face out of contruction paper or card stock that "resembles" the main character and glue it on.  For the arms and legs the child would write different parts of the story like the plot, character, setting, etc.  Then for the "main body" you can illustrate the front of the book on the paper bag.  I thought this was pretty cool!
• Let them draw a picture or a comic strip.  How about letting them design a board game around a book.
• They could pretend that they are the character of the story and write a few diary entries as the character.
• Writing a newspaper article about the story would be fun.  They could be the head reporter!

There are sooo many ways to make writing fun!

In case you missed them, there are tow other posts so far in the 5 Days of Bringing Books to Life series, Books in the Kitchen and Build It!

5 days, 65 bloggers, 325 blog posts! Check out what others on the TOS Crew are writing about for the 5 Days of Series here.

What do you do to make writing more fun?