It’s February. Winter Break is over, Spring Break is many weeks
away, and Mother Nature is not being favorable to Stafford County this year. You
might be feeling less than inspired. Why not take advantage of the Valentine’s
Day holiday and host a Book Speed Dating event? This type of program can be as
simple or complex as you’d like to make it. You can adapt the basic
speed-dating approach and make it work with a large variety of situations. Here
are a few ideas:
- Lunchtime or after school event, volunteer signup. Use fiction books.
- Collaborate with classroom teachers, using whatever genre they’d like to promote. They bring their entire class during class time.
- Collaborate with ELL teachers, using books specially selected for these students.
- Collaborate with the literacy coach (or English teachers), and use specially selected books to promote reading to struggling readers.
Take the program and make it your own! Tonya Dagstani gave a
terrific presentation on this at VAASL this year. She has kindly shared her
presentation and documents here:
Susie Lackey also wrote a blog post for SLJ about speed
dating. She includes links to multiple other blogs written by people who have
done the same:
Blogger Erica Beaton has a YouTube video on the subject:
Remember, the right book is out there for every student.
They just need the opportunity to meet!
I love this idea! At the elementary level perhaps it could be modified as a book speed "friendship" rather than dating. I think it's important to keep students excited about books throughout the year. Activities like this one provide opportunities for kids to be introduced to new books. Very interesting!
ReplyDelete