Book Review

Here's a sample of a book review I wrote for my book club in my Reading Journal on Gone by Michael Grant using an amazing template from the blog, Books, Babies and Bows.

It was developed for younger students to write book reviews. I love this quote from the author, Jenny H:

"What do you do when you cannot find what you want?

Create it."

She created the template for her second grader when she couldn't find any book review forms that were appropriate for the grade level and also worked with nonfiction texts.

Here's a link to the printable .jpg in black and white if you prefer not to print in color.

This cute comic-book like format helps students overcome the anxiety of looking at a blank page to write reviews. Also, I think that having the fun format makes it feel less like homework.

I never assign anything until I've tried it myself, and I found that the template was a little too geared towards elementary students. For example, most of our books don't have illustrators, so I adapted it to include Title, Author, Genre (TAG). I changed "the pictures in this book were," to "The cover made me think." Lastly, I added a box for a favorite quote (textual evidence).

Here is a link to the Middle School Version: 2 per page copymaster on Google Slides, which is the ideal size to paste into our composition book sized Reading Journals.