25 Activities to Make Every Day Read In! Day
Join your students at The Read In! as they chat online with some of the world's best authors of books for children and young adults. Then keep them reading all year long with a variety of reading-related activities from Education World. Included: 25 activities to encourage kids of all ages to read for learning and for fun.
May 10 is The Read In!, a project designed to provide opportunities and experiences to encourage students to "read, write, and communicate in a literate manner." During this daylong event, students in grades K-12 chat online with some of the world's best authors of books for children and young adults. This year's 23 participating Read In! authors include Judy Blume, R. L. Stine, Avi, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and Roland Smith.
More than 325,000 students, teachers, librarians, and parents in about a dozen countries took part in last year's event. If you missed it, you'll want to be sure to participate this year. Afterward, be sure to capitalize on your students' renewed enthusiasm for reading with some of the activities below!
25 Activities to Promote Reading Throughout the Year
Involve your students in any of these activities to make reading fun!
- Take a snapshot of anyone "caught reading" for pleasure at school, and post photos on a "Caught You Reading" bulletin board.
- Make A Downloadable Pop-Up Book.
- Create campaign posters for a "best book" election. Graph the election results.
- Play book and author bingo. Download the free Game Ware Bingo Card Maker to make your own cards.
- Invite a local storyteller or poet to visit the classroom and perform.
- Compare three versions of the same story in the Cinderella, Cinderella, Cinderella WebQuest.
- Match articles cut from newspapers with their correct headlines. Or write new headlines.
- Make Story Sacks for children in a local hospital.
- Play Merriam-Webster's Word Game of the Day.
- Write or e-mail your favorite author or illustrator. For contact information, visit Author Addresses at the Internet Public Library or the Authors/Illustrators page at the Canton (Michigan) Public Library Web site.
- Visit a local convalescent hospital, nursing home, or hospice and read aloud to the patients.
- Write a biography of your favorite author using the Bellingham (Washington) Schools' Biography Maker.
- Design and create a bookmark or bumper sticker with a reading slogan on it.
- Tape-record selections from Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales and Stories, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World, or another folk or fairy tale site. Donate the tapes to the school library.
- Complete a Dr. Seuss's Who's Whoses work sheet.
- Set up a classroom book swap center or lending library.
- Play book charades. Act out a book title or a scene from the book, and challenge others to guess the name of the book.
- Write a story in which two characters from different books meet. Or work in pairs to have the characters write letters to each other.
- Create an Amazon Alphabet mural.
- Write funny captions for pictures cut from magazines.
- Find the Anagrams for your name. Use the best one in a sentence.
- Go on a Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Internet scavenger hunt.
- Perform one of the nursery rhymes at The Mother Goose Pages as a rap.
- Watch a movie based on a book you've read and compare the two. Try using scriptwriting software, such as Sophocles, to write a script for a book you enjoyed.
- Listen to The Writer's Almanac, a five-minute program of poetry and history broadcast daily on Public Radio.
Article by Linda Starr
Education World®
Copyright © 2001 Education World
05/04/2001
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