Book Report 2

By

Michael English

Title: Going Bohemian; (Activities That Engage Adolescents in the Art of Writing Well), Lawrence Baines and Anthony J. Kunkel Edts.; International Reading Association, Newark, DE, 2000

Going Bohemian is a collection activities designed to get middle school and high school kids involved in writing by providing activities that kids would find fun to do and are outside traditional teaching methods. The activities, nevertheless, get students to perform many of the same writing traits and forms of the traditional classroom. Each activity is divided in to six areas:

The objective of the activity; The materials needed to conduct the activity; How to set up the activity; The procedures to follow or how to conduct the activity, The summaries are the authors’ thoughts and experiences in conducting the activities; and enrichment offers teacher follow up similar activities or variations on the same activity. Finally, the authors identify the activities by type: Individual or Group and suggest the amount of time it take to conduct the activity.

Being in Special Education and dealing with reluctant students who struggle with writing due to very low skills, I found this collection of writing activities to be very interesting. Some of the activities would require pre-teaching in order to provide students with enough experience of the concepts of the lesson to be able to understand the purpose of the lesson. Other activities could be used with pre-teaching. I liked format of the lessons with objective and the how or conducting of each lesson clearly explained. By doing this it was easy for me to decide if I could use the activity with my students or how I would have to modify the lesson for them.