Book of the Year

 Today I wanted to share an end-of-the-year activity that my class is working on called the Book of the Year Project. For this project, students get to nominate their favorite book that they read this year, draw the cover of the book, and write an opinion piece explaining why the book is their favorite.

 

Step 1: Design the Cover

Most of the kids in my class love to draw, so to make this project a little more fun for them, I start by having them draw the cover of the best book that they read all year. I usually ask them to draw it on plain white paper in pencil and then I copy their drawings onto cardstock and have them color the copy in. That way I can laminate them and use them to decorate the room!

Here are some of the covers that my kids have drawn in the past:

  

  

Step 2: Project Cover Sheet

Once they have finished drawing and coloring in the cover of their book, I ask students to fill out this cover sheet that they will staple to the front of their completed project.

Step 3: Planning The Essay

Once students get to this step, they have already come up with three reasons that the book they have nominated is their favorite, so I give them the graphic organizer below to start planning. I ask them to find at least three supports for each reason, just like we did in all of the opinion pieces that we wrote this year. 

Step 4: Writing the Essay

For this step I have students use their completed graphic organizer and the guidelines for writing an opinion piece to write a first draft on loose leaf paper.

Once they have edited and revised, I give them the paper below to write their final piece, which they will publish for their classmates to read.

Step 5: Vote

Once everyone has completed this project, we have a day where students can read each others' essays and vote on the book of the year that they think is best using the ballot cards included in this product.

 

Step 6: Poster

I will place a drawing of the winning book on the poster template included in this product and hang it up in our classroom library.

If you would like to use this resource, you can find it in my TPT Store here.

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Usage and Mechanics

Every year our school puts together what we call a "Literary Magazine" in which every single student gets to publish a piece of writing. This year, since we adopted Lucy Calkins and our kids have written so much the Literacy Team decided to have kids polish off their favorite pieces and submit them for the magazine. Of course, this meant that us teachers got to make sure that every single essay was perfect, which took forever, but it opened my eyes to something pretty important and it was actually kind of fun!

I gave my students back all of the writing that they have done this year and we were all impressed by just how much they have written. I think we counted that they had written at least ten five-paragraph essays! I told each of them to pick their favorite piece and then we went over some basics of editing and revising. 

MANY of the mistakes that my kids made were on things that I should have taught them this year. I am ashamed to admit that I did not really explicitly teach grammar a.k.a. usage and mechanics this year unless I noticed that everyone happened to be making the same mistake and gave an impromptu lesson. So, I decided that fourth quarter would be the perfect time to squeeze this in (especially since we already took our end of year writing assessment)!

I went all the way back to the first quarter standards and taught them how to use possessive nouns properly in their writing using this little packet that I created. (FREEBIE ALERT)

Then, I had them check their writing to see if they made any possessive noun mistakes and I was so proud of them for identifying them, referring to what I called their "cheat sheet", and fixing them without my help! 

Because I was so happy with how this lesson worked out, I decided to keep going and this week we worked on the next standard: comparisons with adjectives and adverbs. You can see the "cheat sheet" below and click on it to grab the whole packet from my TPT store.

I am hoping to get as many of these standards covered as possible in the next 6 weeks that we have left, so if you like these, stay tuned! I'm planning to post them one by one as I create them and then I'll bundle them all together and hopefully create a workbook to use throughout the entire school year next year.

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