Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Who Could Ask for Anything More: A Kid Reviewing Kid Books

This Kid Reviews Books is a site maintained by a kid who as the title implies reviews books.

If you're looking for books to recommend to kids, which I hope you are, what better way than to find another kid who recommends them. Plus, this is a site worth having your students, especially if you teach elementary or middle school, check out.

I first found out about the site from some tweets. Here they are.





So naturally, I headed over to the site to start exploring, and encourage you to do the same. Please visit. Just click on the image below, and once you're at the site, scroll through the blog, but also check the pages, "About 'This Kid' -- Erik!" and "Books I Read This Year." This kid is a prolific reader, but also a prolific writer. Think of all the time he spends not only reading the books, but also taking the time to write these reviews.

http://thiskidreviewsbooks.com/

So now that you've visited Erik's site, let me know what you think. Would you recommend the site to students and to librarians, or use the site yourself? How could  you get your own students blogging about books?

This kid has also written a book and has a Twitter account.

https://twitter.com/ThisKid_Erik

You can find him here on Twitter:

Here is some info about his book:

http://thiskidreviewsbooks.com/check-out-my-book/

Would love to find out more about Erik, for instance, how he got motivated to start the blog and what recommendations he has for other kids to get them also interested in reading and discussing books. 







5 comments:

  1. Thank you very much for the nice things you say about my blog! :) To answer your question, when I was 9 I told my parents I wanted to write book reviews for a newspaper (I always loved to read). My dad suggested that I start a blog because it might be hard to get a newspaper to hire a kid. :) So that's why I started my blog.
    I am always looking for kids to be guest reviewers or post their own stories and artwork on my blog. I think a blog is a great way to talk to people about things you like - for me it's books and reading! :)
    Thank you again!
    Erik A.K.A. This Kid Reviews Books

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  2. Wonderful website. Erik does an excellent job at finding interesting reviews. His posts are thoughtful and informative. Keep up the great work!

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  3. This is precisely why I will always call Erik, SuperKid….until, of course, he turns into SuperMan? Kidding aside, Erik is one very talented young man.

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  4. This particular site is right up my alley since I teach ELA in middle school. My students are always looking for something interesting to read. I think when they read Erik’s blog and see that they are the same age as him, they might relate to him more. Additionally they might take suggests from him seriously as oppose to my book recommendations. I love several things about “This Kids Reviews Books” blog. For starters, he seems to be reading current literature; I am not sure if it is because he has read all the “older” books, but the books he has reviewed appear to be up-to-date. Secondly, Erick mentions that he has earned over 1500 AR points. This is amazing! My students are also familiar with Accelerated Reader and have point goals set for them each marking period. I wish somewhere in his reviews that he listed the book level and the point value of the book. This would be convenient for my students after they have read his review to have that information available to them. Lastly, I absolutely love his card catalog of all the books he has read/reviewed. I can direct my students to their age group and have read over his reviews and select several books they would be interested in reading. Thanks again for sharing this blog.

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  5. I would absolutely use this site and would recommend it to my colleagues. It's was so exciting to see how exciting students were to talk about books. It's a teachers dream come true. You could use this site in many different ways. Students can use the site to explore books that they may be interested in or students can create book reviews of their own. My district recently purchased the Lucy Calkins writing units to be implemented. One of the units is Opinion Writing based on books students have read. Having students create book reviews digitally would be a great addition to the unit!

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