Book Report Drudgery

There so many other ways to help children understand literature.

Read a book; write a report. Read a book; write a report. Repeat. Is producing more text really the only, or the best, way to interact with a text? It’s wise to step back and consider what purpose the book report fulfills, and what other ways this purpose can be achieved.

After reading a book, we want our students to show that they paid attention and understood what they were reading. They are supposed to know who the main characters are (whether historical or fictional), where they were, when the story took place, what happened, and why. Discussing the book with them is a wonderful option that generally isn’t available to teachers with a class of 25. The classic book report provides tangible proof of instruction. But there is another option that enables our students to not only show their understanding, but build on it.

If students create a theater production, either by acting or with puppets, they are going to interact with the book in deeper ways than a written report generally requires. Even a simple re-telling of a story requires deciding which elements of the plot are essential and which can be cut, and this in turn leads to an appreciation of the author’s original effort to craft the book. In order to bring characters to life, students have to decide what makes each one distinct, as well as engage problem-solving skills to portray those distinctions. Additionally, replacing narration and description with original dialogue requires students to examine each character’s motives. Analyzing the setting is essential to choosing props and creating a backdrop. And the goal isn’t a perfect stage production; unlike the book report, it isn’t necessary to completely master another skill-set (handwriting, spelling, punctuation…) to prove understanding. Just approaching a book from this angle requires a variety of higher thinking skills.

As a younger elementary student, my daughter had a chance to take a field trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art and see a traveling exhibit of a miniature puppet theater. Students could interact with the theater, dressing the puppets and arranging them against several different backdrops to tell stories. Inspired by this, she began drawing figures from our most recent read-aloud, The Little Princess. Her puppets were simple, just hand-drawn figures cut out of cardstock, and her stage was the space under the piano bench, with a piece of cloth thrown over it for a curtain. But in the process of deciding how to draw her characters, she had to choose which details were important, whether it was a figure’s height or clothes or pose. And she also created believable new story lines, extending what she knew about the characters and the setting.

Several years later, our two girls became fascinated with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They had read a condensed version, seen a stage play, and played with a pop-up book of the Globe Theater and stick puppets. But they wanted to perform the play. It took a lot of ingenuity to re-write the script so that two actors and two stuffed toys could carry all the essential roles — and it required a lot of analysis to decide which characters and which scenes were essential. When one actor encountered difficulties changing costumes, their knowledge of the background of the play enabled them to improvise dialogue until the character could appear on-stage.

Finally, as high school students, both girls gained a deep appreciation for literary works when challenged to create ten-minute interpretations for their public speaking club. The books ranged from Sid Fleischman’s hilarious tall tale, Chancy and the Grand Rascal, to Corrie ten Boom’s autobiography The Hiding Place. The decisions about how to physically portray their characters required a deep understanding of their background, their historical setting, and their psychology. Creating a satisfyingly complete performance entailed unweaving the longer work and seeing just how carefully it had been composed by the original author.

So we should give our students the tools to interact with literature this way. We should take them to plays and puppet shows, compare movie and book versions of a story, sign them up for public speaking clubs and drama camps, and provide them with the simple materials to put on their own shows. It doesn’t take much: some cardstock and some kind of stick (popsicle sticks, shish kebob skewers, even twigs) can become fine puppets, and a few items from the thrift store provide a variety of characters with costumes. A tension curtain rod in a doorway can support a stage curtain, and a blanket draped over two chairs can become a puppet theater. The analysis that goes into interacting with a text this way, whether it’s fiction or a historical work, will ensure that the book becomes an indelible part of your student.