Musical Bean Bags!

It's Back-to-School week and many middle and high school English classes are coming to choose new books! Whoo-hoo!

To follow our "Summer Reads" promotion, I wanted to do something with the song "Summer Breeze." It seemed like a version of "Musical Chairs" would work well.

I wanted the activity to...
1) Expose students to various high-interest titles
2) Build capacity for sustained reading
3) Practice book-choosing behaviors 
(read summary, read into the book, take some time!)

After Round 1: Two 'winners' (in red) chose books!

For this version of Musical Chairs, everyone always has a spot, but gradually people leave the game as they find a book they'd like to read longer. In each round, they have two books at their place to review and read for about 4-5 minutes. 

When the music is ON they dance around the area in one direction. When the music STOPS they sit at the nearest spot and read.

I needed 24 places to sit, one for each student, so I did 20 bean bags in parallel rows with two chairs on each end to 'contain' the scene. 

I didn't use only chairs because I felt students might choose to leave the game just to go sit in the bean bags. This way, if they decided to leave the game (yay, with a book!) they'd be choosing to leave their bean bag to go sit in a regular chair.

(I'm probably overthinking, but it's always all about the bean bags!)

Here's a slide with the directions. The Spotify logo clicks over to a "Summer Reads" playlist. 

This activity is super fun the first time, but probably not great to repeat over and over. Still, it was easy to set up, the kiddos enjoyed it, AND, best of all, many went home with one of the books I picked out!

Some details:
We played three rounds which allowed time for free-range browsing and checking out at the end.

When someone exited the game, I added another title to their spot from a backup stack, so the whole thing took 72 books (48 to start + another 24 as backup) plus more for other classes. 

I did the activity for all grades who wanted to come and pulled books of various levels within that age band (middle grade or young adult).

Titles at each spot were paired to be appealing to a boy or a girl. (In general, I find that girls read anything and boys don't usually choose "girly" covers).