December Book Project

December Book Project

This month, instead of a reading calendar, you will choose a book to read for a month long book project.

There are several steps to this project.

1. Choose a chapter book AT YOUR READING LEVEL that you can comfortably read after school and finish in two weeks.

2. The book for this project should be fiction. It can be any genre within fiction, historic, realistic, humor, science fiction, mystery etc…

3. You will be focusing on character traits. Think of Horton Hears a Who and the related painted essay called Horton Gives a Hoot. In this book Horton was brave. What words can you use to describe YOUR main character?

4. Keep track of the character’s traits on the attached character trait sheet. Make sure you give examples of how you know the character is like this FROM YOUR BOOK.

5. In class, we will be working on a literature response. You will need to have finished your book and your character trait page by MONDAY, DECEMBER 14. That will give you two weeks to finish your book.

6. Finally, you will be working on a BOOK PROJECT that shows what you know from reading your book. There are many, many projects you can choose. You could do a poster, shoe box diorama, PowerPoint presentation, song, poem or rap. You could make a book cube and write about the book on each side. You could even write a play based on the book and present it to the class. Or, how about a puppet show! There are many different ideas and you can even make up your own. If you read a story set in Egypt, you could do some research on Egypt and tell how the setting was important in your book. Be creative. You will be presenting the project to the class on DECEMBER 21st!


Dates to remember:

December 14 – Book all read and character trait page done. We start working on the literature response in class.

December 21 – Book projects due and presentations begin!

So, choose a great book and get started. You may also borrow a book from my library, the school library, or head to the town library. You do not need to buy a book for this project.

Some helpful websites:
http://www.region15.org/curriculum/CHARACTERIZATION-Portrait.pdf

http://home.att.net/~teaching/litcircl/charact.pdf

http://education.vermont.gov/new/pdfdoc/pgm_curriculum/literacy/writing/benchmarks/grade_4/grade_4_1_7_response.pdf