The 7th grade students visit the Middle School Library once a month to select independent reading materials under in various\u00a0genres or themes. \u00a0The theme for November was Young Adult Realistic Fiction. \u00a0Each student picked out a YA novel. \u00a0After having read\u00a0the novel, each student\u00a0analyzed the themes and literary elements common to most young adult realistic novels in a written paragraph.<\/p>\n
They returned to the library and shared their books in a speed-summary activity. \u00a0In randomly assigned pair, one student summarized his or her novel first in 45 seconds while their partners listened. \u00a0They then switched roles.<\/p>\n
After the first round, new partners were\u00a0paired up and students\u00a0had to summarize the same books but within 30 seconds. The final challenge was to produce a summary that captured\u00a0the most essential parts of the novel in 15 seconds. This is to prepare for their next assignment: writing a pithy summary for a free-choice book — fiction or nonfiction. (Inspiration of the next assignment came from the very short annotations for American Library Association’s Notable Books for Children Lists<\/a>.)<\/p>\n [jwplayer mediaid=”1691″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 7th grade students visit the Middle School Library once a month to select independent reading materials under in various\u00a0genres or themes. \u00a0The theme for November was Young Adult Realistic Fiction. \u00a0Each student picked out a YA novel. \u00a0After having read\u00a0the novel, each student\u00a0analyzed the themes and literary elements common to most young adult realistic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15323,1113,990,963],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-7th-grade","category-class-activities","category-general-news","category-ms-library-newsletter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/mslibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}