Interactive Thursday - Read and Share Board

Happy Thursday. Believe it or not I am linking up to a linky party on the right day!!
I thought I would join in the interactive fun being hosted by my hero when it comes to all things interactive, Erin at I'm Lovin Lit for...

I wanted to share a fabulous freebie I picked up this summer on the blog Owl-ways be Inspired. It is from Tracy at Creekside Teacher Tales (I do not mean to make it sound like I know her - I do not, just blog stalk a wee-bit). She shared a product called "Tell All About It - An Interactive Book Recommendation Board".

Here are some pictures of it in action in my classroom:

First of all it comes with the awesome title banner and the little words. It also comes with the expression kids from Melonheadz that I love.



 Next it comes with these forms for students to fill out giving the title of the book, how it made them feel and if the do or do not recommend the book and why.

Here is how our board is looking right now:

 Students hand their recommendations into me for a quick look before we post them to the board.
What is in that extra long pencil case you might ask, well it is the extra slips...

We were using the feeling cards first since we had just been working on identifying how a character was feeling in the story and making a strong connection to ourselves and a time we felt the same way. Used the cute feelings card when doing an intro to this lesson. I will have them move on to the book review slips soon. I like that they are quick little response cards but are providing practise in some skill areas that we will continue to build upon over the year (we have only been in school 23 days!).
I also like that the students can read their classmates opinions about the books we have in our library.

There is also a slip for making connections - which totally fits in with what we are working on!

But I must confess, when I first went to use this product I did not look closely at the pages I was copying and they were not exactly what I needed for my lessons. There are the awesome feeling pages and the awesome connection pages but I wanted students to make connections between what the character was feeling and a time they had felt similarly. So I made this little page for my students to fill out:



 At the bottom after the when they needed to add a sentence explaining how they were the same.
I made pages with the different emotions but ended up just using the b&w kids with smiles. I like starting out with sentence frames like this and checklists until they have mastered (or at least are very comfortable with) the expectation for writing a connection. You can pick up my pages here if you are interested in using them.