Holiday Break Reading Challenge Activity 7

Best and Worst Book-to-Movie Adaptations

This Activity is completely and totally based on your opinion.

1 - You need to choose the BEST Book-to-Movie Adaptation you've seen and the WORST Book-to-Movie Adaptation you've seen.

2 - Post the pictures of the book cover next to the movie poster for each pair.

Best book to movie adaptation:


Worst book to movie adaptation:

If you are looking for some boredom busters over the holiday break, check out Karin's Book Nook.

I love her Create a Cover activity, so I am re-posting her instructions, along with my contribution. I'd love to know if you try it!

Here are the directions for the Create a Cover activity.

1 – Go to “Fake Name Generator” or click http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

The name that appears is your author name.

2 – Go to “Random Word Generator” or click http://www.websitestyle.com/parser/randomword.shtml

The word listed under “Random Verb” is your title.

3 – Go to “FlickrCC” or click http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php

Type your title into the search box. The first photo that contains a person is your cover.

4 – Use Picnik, or something similar to put it all together. Be sure to crop and/or zoom in.

And here is my attempt:

When his world began to crumble around him, his anger took on a life of its own. Can anyone save Seth from self-destruction?

What I especially love about this activity is how it can generate an actual writing idea. I still need to get back into my NaNoWriMo novel and do some revision. But maybe I'll start a new novel first!

Soar to Success

Part of my job as literacy coach in my middle school is to recognize and help struggling readers. We use an intervention called Literacy Groups. These are essentially small group reading strategy instruction sessions. I have four paraprofessionals who lead these small groups of three to five students. They work with the fifth and sixth grades.

The instructional strategy we use in Literacy Groups is Reciprocal Teaching. It focuses on the reading strategies of clarifying, predicting, questioning and summarizing. The hardest part of working with these struggling readers is getting them to understand that these strategies must be used by them consistently, and not just during the reading they do in group time.

I had an idea that the best way to get them to understand this might be to have them reflect more on which strategies they are using well and how it helps them to be a better reader. To increase their motivation for reflection, I videotaped them explaining how one strategy helped them in the last story we read: Truman's Aunt Farm.






You can see more videos of three different Literacy Groups on my YouTube Channel.