What You Can Do With Books Besides Reading Them

Book-related activities in the classroom

People are often surprised when I tell them that my college students aren’t reading books. Sometimes even my students are shocked to learn this fact on the first day. In composition courses, though, we do not always have time to read entire books in one semester. The focus is on writing: essay structure, research strategies, and documentation. Don’t worry; they read plenty of short essays and articles. (Note: my literature classes are a different story.)

Even though we don’t have time to read entire novels, I still bring books to class throughout the semester. I bring a whole bag of books. As it turns out, books can be used for more than just reading.

The following three activities can be adapted to many disciplines without too much extra work.

Activity 1: Judging a book by its cover

For this activity, we focus only on the covers of the book, asking questions and making assumptions. I hand out a book to each student and ask students to take notes on the following before switching books with a partner:

What do you think about the title?

What genre do you think this book is and why?

What are your reactions to the cover art?

Based on the book cover alone, would you want to read the whole book?

Activity 2: The hook

Since we spend a fair amount of time in class talking about attention-grabbers and introductions, it makes sense to read first pages with the same level of care that we spend on the front cover.

In this activity, we read the first page(s) and consider the strategies authors used to hook the reader. After this class activity, there are always a few students who seek me out and tell me they want to buy/check out the books they were reading. Encouraging literacy isn’t the goal of the activity, but I certainly indulge in a mini-happy dance when students are excited about reading.

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