Would you buy a box of Pumpkin O's?
Recently my younger daughter had to do a "cereal box book report."
My mother, who was trying to help her with it at one point, was not amused. "What's wrong with a regular book report?" she asked me.
This new take on a book report encompassed far more than reading and writing.
My daughter came home with the instructions long before the deadline for her cereal box book report, but like most kids, she put it off until the weekend before it was due.
I had a hard time getting her to pick a book for her report, but eventually she settled on "Pumpkinhead," which she had read to me right before Halloween.
The instructions included templates for the top and sides of the box. At top was space to write the name of the book and the author and to give it a star rating. On one side of the box was an area to list the characters with one-sentence description of each and to provide the setting of the story. On the other side was room for a brief summary of the plot.
But then it got interesting. We took all of our cereal boxes out of the cabinet for inspiration.
For the front of the box, she had to create a cereal name and shape corresponding to an aspect of book. She drew it out and colored it on a blank sheet of paper and then we glued it to the box. She named her cereal Pumpkin O's and made them in little pumpkin shapes. (She also added blueberries because, well, she likes blueberries.)
For the back she had to come up with a game that you might commonly find on kid's cereal box -- a word scramble, find-a-word or treasure hunt. She settled on a maze in which Pumpkinhead had to be reunited with his body.
When the report was ready to be turned in, the book was slipped inside the cereal box and then brought out for the class presentation.
I admit it -- I am a sucker for projects. Not only did this encompass the usual requirements of a book report, it has the added benefit of encouraging the second-graders' creativity. And parents get excited when they see their children so engaged in their classwork.
Projects like this can make book reports -- and reading -- more fun for students.
It's a far cry from the one-page summaries I can remember writing. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Mom.
Colleen Almeida Smith is a Tulsa World assistant editor and mother of a second-grader and a seventh-grader. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/colleenalmeida.
