Analytical Grammar offers quality grammar and language learning products for grades 4 through high school. We received Seasons 1, 2 and 3 of Beyond the Book Report (BBR) for review. Season 1 and 2 are more on the 6th to 8th grade level while Season 3 I would recommend for high schoolers. We (6th and 10th graders and I) worked several days a week to get through one unit from each of the Seasons. Each of the Seasons includes a teaching guide and a DVD containing instructional videos, printable PDFs and printable Power Point slides of the lectures for handy reference or note taking. Within each of the teaching guides for all three season you will find lots of examples, all from the book Charlotte’s Web by E.B White.
The teacher's guides are very self-explanatory and easy to follow. It gives you, the teacher, guidelines, possible dialog to follow, and breaks everything down by teaching days. Teaching days are days that you are actually involved in, well, teaching. There are sometimes many days between teaching days where the student is simply doing their project, reading a book or doing research that doesn't necessarily require your intervention. For example, the basic book report has four teaching days but the entire section took us nearly 3 weeks to get through.
Each individual Season of BBR is $24.95 to purchase from the Analytical Grammar website. However, they do offer a bundle deal where you can get all three Seasons for $69.95.
The teacher's guides are very self-explanatory and easy to follow. It gives you, the teacher, guidelines, possible dialog to follow, and breaks everything down by teaching days. Teaching days are days that you are actually involved in, well, teaching. There are sometimes many days between teaching days where the student is simply doing their project, reading a book or doing research that doesn't necessarily require your intervention. For example, the basic book report has four teaching days but the entire section took us nearly 3 weeks to get through.
Each individual Season of BBR is $24.95 to purchase from the Analytical Grammar website. However, they do offer a bundle deal where you can get all three Seasons for $69.95.
Season 1’s assignments include the basic book report, pamphlet report and journalism report. Each of the assignments build on the last and incorporate (literary) terms previously learned. From this season, we did the basic book report. That assignment included a reading log, paraphrase, summary, literary terms worksheet, and a choice of either creating study questions or a crossword puzzle. From the DVD I printed rubrics for the kids which outline exactly what was due, what was expected for each of the individual assignments and how much each item would be worth. I’ve never really given the kids rubrics before, mostly because I’ve just never thought about it, but it really streamlined things. Normally, with multiple-stage projects the kids come to me regularly to ask about the next step but the rubric eliminated this.
Season 2 covers poetry and drama. The poetry was what we focused on. There were many more concepts in this season than in the previous one. For example, trying to learn the difference between iambic, dactylic, anapestic and trochaic “feet” was hard- even for me. I’ve never been big into poetry, reading or writing it, so the majority of these terms were just as new to me as they were to the kids. We watched several videos about poetry terms, poetry types and figurative language. The figurative language exercises were fun to do with the kids. They began listening for figurative language in every day conversation and were quick to point it out! The poetry book report has the kids write four poems all based on the story, character, plot and setting in the book. They each had to write a limerick, haiku, sonnet and narrative poem. There is a 65 question final test over the entire poetry unit. Instead of doing the test as a test, we used it as oral review and discussion. Again, the rubric was a lifesaver. It really breaks down what is expected and what to look for in their own work before handing it in to me.
Season 3, obviously intended for high schoolers, wasn’t as easy for my 6th grader. She and I had to work more closely together on this one. Its assignments include essays, oral reports and research papers. I really wanted to get through the research paper in this season but it has 26 teaching days!! As I mentioned previously, there are sometimes many days between teaching days for the projects so there was just no way for us to work through it in the time allowed for the review. However, we will be doing it in the future. Instead, we opted to try to squeeze in the oral report or “public speaking book report”. It only had 4 teaching days and requires the use of PowerPoint, which my kids love using. We watched videos about public speaking, an example oral report and effective PowerPoints. We also did the worksheet that went along with the effective PowerPoint video. Overall, this was a fun, quick assignment. We got through it in a little less than 2 weeks. We had to work fast and probably could have taken more time but the kids had fun presenting their projects- and that’s what matters, right?
My Bottom Line
Beyond the Book Report is an excellent product. I like that I can use one product for multiple students, even with a four year grade difference. The curriculum is thorough and easy to use. The rubrics provided for each assignment were probably my favorite part... silly I know. It just made things so much easier for me! While Beyond the Book Report isn't a complete language arts curriculum, because there isn't really any grammar work, simply adding a grammar product would round it out nicely. Thank you Analytical Grammar for this great opportunity!
Click the banner below to read more reviews from the Crew about different products offered by Analytical Grammar!
No comments:
Post a Comment