Trade Book Experience!

Trade books can be used in a variety of ways in a classroom. They are great to start a lesson or unit off with, background reading, do a book talk with, create projects from, and they provide numerous research opportunities for pretty much any topic you choose. Trade books are educational and enjoyable at the same time and make learning fun and meaningful. Trade books can also be geared toward a specific learning need and can be used to differentiate instruction which is very important for all types of learners.

For one of our assignments in class, we were instructed to do a trade book project. My trade book was on rocks and minerals which I had previously taught 2 lessons on with my group for fieldwork. The book was an excellent read and I highly recommend it to anyone teaching science! The title of the book is A Project Guide to Rocks and Minerals by Claire O’Neal. This book stood out to me because the cover page was intriguing and contains pictures of really cool, unique minerals. As I skimmed through the book, there was so much kid friendly information on rocks and minerals and had an experiment or project for each sub topic. For example, one experiment teaches you how to grow your own minerals and your own salt crystal garden, and geode! It tells you all the materials necessary needed to make the projects and step by step instructions.

I made an animoto and did a book talk on my tradebook including pictures and experiments from the book. We had to make a book trailer for our books which was a lot of fun and super simple! You were able choose your own theme and song. You could add pictures and put a little caption on the pictures, or just put the pictures, or just the words! It was a great learning experience and I would definitely use animoto in my own future classroom one day. I could have students create their own trailers for a book or a topic, introduce a topic by showing the animoto, or even show them an animoto to choose a book to read! There are so many ways to implement these awesome tools into a classroom and I am very excited to keep learning more about them and use them!