Battle of the Books Activities

Some of the fun activities that people hold for their students include:

Sleep overs at the school

Relay race -

Ask students a practice question. They run to the end of the gym and pick up a paper plate in which name of the book title is. They come back to the line and the coach judges whether it is the correct book. If it is, the second person in line takes the plate with the title on it and runs back to find the correct author.

At CV we play "Battle-Fish" with the titles and authors on index cards. In a single deck, a "match" is if you can either ask for and get or (if told to "fish") draw the title that goes with your author, or the author that goes with the title you have in your hand. Winners have the most pairs when the cards are gone. We also play with several kids, and you have to remember the name of the student you are asking for a match. We do this to work on sportsmanship as well as on memorizing title/authors for the Battle list.

At Denali I play "Battle Charades" w/the 3/4th group. They love it! I usually do it at the beginning of the year. Students have a title list in hand and volunteer to act out a word in a title or some obvious scene that would allow the audience to guess a title/author. They can work in small groups too.

Try out http://librarything.com This is a site that allows members to create personal book catalogs. I created one for BoB! Take a look and add more titles. I'm just adding as I read.

login: alaskabob

password: read

Robin Turk

For the past 2 years at Hermon Hutchens Elementary in Valdez, I've purchased or written AR quizzes for all 3rd-6th grade battle books. (Renaissance Learning is on to the Alaska Battle of the Books, and must be checking out the Battle Book website in the spring for the following year's titles.) By fall most of the books have quizzes except the Alaska authors, and even some of those were done this year. I tell the kids, if they can have 5 battle books read at 80% by the first part of November, they are invited to a "Boot Camp". (I took the boot camp idea from Teresa Paulsen in Tok.) This year we're going to the high school swimming pool on Friday for two hours and will follow up swimming with pizza. We have over 50 kids participating. I find the boys especially are jumping on board this year.

This year I have two parents who come in once a week during lunch recess to work with any kids who have read at least 3 battle book and wants to be on a team. One mom works with the 3rd/4th kids, the other one works with the 5th/6th grade students. We down-loaded the memory game from the website as well as the practice questions. They seem to be having fun. If you are interested in some of the other things we do to promote the program, let me know. Barb Bryson

Download an ALA Read poster with Eric Kimmel the author of [EricKimmel.pdf|__Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock__]

Go to LibraryThing to see copies of this year's proposed book covers.

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