It's no secret that today's students are screen-hounds. They spend a lot of their time in front of screens... a 2013 study said that a group of 6th graders self-reported that they spent 4+ hours a day in front of screen on a school day, and more on the weekends. FOUR HOURS a day! That is an incredible amount of screen time for kids... and that doesn't include the amount of time they spend looking at screens for school. Whoa.
Book circulation also tends to drop off in middle school... kids in middle school are more apathetic than their elementary school peers. They just don't care to read the way they used to. So the million-dollar question remains - how do we engage them? Here's a simple way that you can grab your readers of ANY age... The 7th grade science teachers are having their students read sci-fi books (LOVE this idea, BTW!) for class. They asked me to book-talk some sci-fi that we have in the library. The problem was that during the time slot they had their students, I already had another class scheduled, and none of us wanted to wait until the following week. The solution? iMovie! I went to our catalog and searched for keyword science fiction, browsed through the titles, and picked the 10 books I thought would most appeal to our kids. I found pictures of the front covers of the books and loaded them into iMovie. I then recorded myself reading the publisher's blurbs found on Amazon.com. I posted the resulting movie on YouTube and shared the link with the teachers, who showed them in class. The result? I have hold lists miles long for those 10 books... it goes back to my post from last week about raising readers... those kids want to read those books because I took an hour of my time to make a movie. YES. The return on that time investment has been well worth it! Want to watch it? Just don't make fun of it please. I used to record commercials for Radio Disney and I'm STILL not used to the way my voice sounds! So what are my next steps? I'm going to pick some genres to focus on each month and promote those books on my YouTube channel. Hopefully this will further engage our reluctant readers. What do YOU do to capture their imagination as readers?
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About the AuthorHi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Christine Hurley. This is my 17th year of teaching - I've taught Kindergarten, 4th grade, elementary media, and now I am in my 6th year of teaching middle school media! Archives
September 2020
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