Book Reports
AP season makes the end of the spring semester at my school challenging, as I’m sure it does at many schools. Students are in and out of class to take AP exams, then when APs are over my school jumps straight into final exams. I have long believed that end of year assessments in language classes are intrinsically cumulative, so typically I have just made an exam based on whatever unit we end up on at the end of the year. However, I don’t want to leave any students out from any content that they might miss due to taking AP exams so last year I played around with a different kind of final unit that would be mostly self-guided.
A book report!
Starting at the beginning of AP exams, students selected a book to read from the class library. I did curate my collection a little bit for this project. While students have access to any of my books throughout the year, I wanted to make sure that the books I made available had something the students could investigate more if they wanted. I then had them create a schedule for themselves: when would they be out of class for APs? How many class periods would the have to read? How much would they need to read each day to have time to work on their presentation?
Each class day then was made up of 3 parts: Structured Input review, independent reading, discussion/independent reflection.
I made the structured input review packet to review the grammar concepts I’m asked to cover in level 4. Students have seen these structures, used these structures, and can more or less recognize the structures in context. Now I am asking them to select the right form to get across the intended meaning. Check out the posts on Structured Input to learn more! An alternative if you’re not ready to dive into structured input, I had a lot of success using Independent Textivities from Comprehensible Classroom as a way to hold kids accountable for reading something during class.
The next part of class, independent reading, was exactly that. Though I did allow students to read books together, they had to complete the project independently. When students finished reading for the day, they moved to the independent reflection activity. Rather than summarizing what they read, students were trying to say something about the content by connecting what was happening in their book to themes we’d been discussing as a class, or drawing comparisons to other texts and experiences they’d had. The goal was to push past plot retelling and into the kind of interpretive thinking the assessment would eventually require.
The independent review activity asked students to say something about their book, more than just summarizing. We also saved time each day for class discussion where we discussed one of eight themes, the same themes would be used as a bank for the presentation Q&A and the writing prompt for the final assessment.
For the final assessment, students gave a presentation on their book. The format was completely open, and I really do mean COMPLETELY open. Talk about your book, make slides, bring a poster, record a video. The presentation itself was pass/fail: did you read the book? Can you talk about it? Do you sound prepared? But the real assessment happened in the Q&A that followed. I asked questions drawn from our eight themes, and what I was listening for was holistic, could they demonstrate comprehension of what they read, connect it to something bigger, and sustain an actual conversation about it in Spanish? A strong response wasn’t just accurate; it was alive.
The written piece worked the same way. On the day of the final, students received a cold prompt drawn from a shortened list of five themes. In class, timed, no scaffolding. Because we had discussed these themes every single day of the unit, the content wasn’t a surprise — only which theme they’d be writing about was. That’s the design: reduce the unknown, raise the bar on what they do with it.
Here’s page from the workbook, and the Final Exam Writing document with a rubric an planning sheet!
Check it out on TPT