The Lightning Thief End of Book Project and Teacher Resources

The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan, has become a mainstay in my reading class (my book review, located on my now defunct literacy blog, can be found HERE). For five years now, my students have been enjoying this fantastic book, and a thematic unit on Greek Mythology alongside the reading of the book. You can view my post titled Some 5th Grade Greek Mythology Resources for some great websites and information about teaching Greek Myth.

When reading The Lightning Thief, I call upon the following pages for some great resources:

• An overview of Lightning Thief resources at Rick Riordan's website: A table of contents page with tons of great resources.
• A chapter by chapter teachers guide from Rick Riordan's website: It's the first link from the above table of contents. It's an awesome resources, it's huge, comprehensive, and it's HUGE.
• A complete unit by chapters with questions and vocabulary: Again, from Rick Riordan's website (it's a great site).

Now, when you're done and you're ready to do an end of book project, I have everything you'll need right here:

• First, head off again to Rick Riordan's website for some awesome project ideas on the page titled School Project Ideas.
• Finally (this is why most of you came): The Lightning Thief end of book project (.doc format).
• If you need more explanation on the book brochure portion, seek help at my post titled Book Report Project Idea: Book Brochures.

A New, and More Difficult, Book Report Format

I have previously posted a few times about book report formats and cool book report themes. The one I used last semester was called Book Report Sandwiches, and I have also used the Book Report Brochures as both an individual book report and an end of book activity.

The sandwiches are well and good, and my class enjoyed doing the brochures very much. I kept a few of the exemplary works posted on a bulletin board in the classroom, and as you can see I constantly had many of these up there. It was a badge of honor to get a book report posted on the board, and a few students had multiples up there.

I'm going to be asking my students to do something a little more demanding... a little more "grown up" this semester. I have chosen to use what we're going to called the "detailed long format." This Detailed Long Format asks students to do quite a bit of analysis. It clocks in at 5 pages, and is very in depth for this age group. If you're looking for something a little more challenging for your students, I recommend using this format of book report. 

Book Report Idea: Book Report Sandwiches

My students are learning to love to read. I say learning because like so many other students, they don't see the joy in reading when it's been reduced to worksheets, basal readers, and isolated skill work.

I focus on letting my students read silently every day for 20 minutes, and when I do this, I'm reminded of my all time favorite class, 7th grade Literature with Ms. Gossett. This class was very simple, she had hundreds and hundreds of books available. We were allowed to read anything we wanted as long as it was within a year of our level below or higher. That was the whole class, we read and read and read, and produced book reports in different formats when we were done. That was the class that I actually read a novel for the first time, and I was hooked.

It's just sad that I didn't have that experience until 7th grade, and this was an advanced level course. How many students never get this opportunity?

So, to make a long story short, I ask my students to read and find something they enjoy. Of course, it's important to tie this reading into something tangible, in our case, isolated skills taught within the literary experience.

When my students are done with a book, they must produce a book report of some sort. I recently come across a great format that my entire class is "eating up," and that is the book report sandwich. This gives you the different areas of the report as bread, lettuce, tomatoes, etc., and each different ingredient of the sandwich. As I said, I came across this and can take no credit for it. I found this idea on the website for Mystic Valley Regional Chart School, and you can access this great .pdf file, it is called Sandwich Book Report. The document contains the necessary papers you would copy to make the sandwich, in both color and black and white, a scoring rubric, and some rough draft pages with prompts. It's excellent stuff!

Book Report Project Idea: Book Brochures

There are numerous, practically infinite, ways to do book reports. But, I would definitely argue that they are very important in the classroom. We want our students to read, and we want them to know that they're accountable to what they read. For me, the absolute back bone of my literacy instruction is the daily read aloud. We read books together all year, as a shared experience, and much of the reading instruction is themed around the book. For example, we just completed our first read aloud this year, The Castle in the Attic, by Elizabeth Winthrop (a fantastic choice for 4th or 5th grade read alouds, especially early in the year, HERE is a short post I did many years ago on this book).  So a lot of instruction was themed around the knights of the round table, chivalry, and castles.

But that's somewhat beside the point. At the end of each read aloud, I ask students to produce some sort of a project. One of my favorites is the book brochure. The following images will show how this brochure was assigned (there are so many ways to individualize this that it's ridiculous to even start mentioning some of those ways), and the finished products hanging on the wall.

It's simple, start with a sheet of construction paper, and fold it in thirds to look like a brochure. When you unfold the brochure, you have an inside (the inside of the flaps) and an outside. It's a great project, and students really are starting to understand that I'm asking them to step up to a higher level of quality. This is the first go around, on only the third week of school. So next time around, I'll see a sharp improvement in the quality of their brochures.

This first image shows what I assigned this go around. It includes a short opinion, a comic strip (of their favorite scene), and the students own cover art for the book. On the inside, I asked for a summary (and found out that numerous students had no idea what this was (they were putting their opinion instead of summarizing), which was good information to know and discuss), as well as four major settings, and three major themes (which is our skill for this week). Finally, they had to complete a short character file for two major characters.

This second image is the view of the cover of an exemplary brochure.

This final image shows the inside of that same brochure.