My five-year-old daughter has a healthy obsession with the According to Humphrey the Hamster series of books. She got one of the books for Christmas and we’ve been reading through the entire series since then. Last week I came home from a bike ride and she couldn’t wait to show me her latest art project! It was a paper replica of how she pictured Humphrey’s cage. She had even used some paper and tape to create a little hamster wheel to put in his cage. On a scale of 1-10 I was at about 15 for how impressed I was that she came up with that idea on her own. 

Inspired by my daughter’s creation of a replica of Humphrey the Hamster’s cage, here are some other ideas for alternatives to traditional book report assignments.

• Create a book trailer video. This is a short video intended to get people excited to read a book. Students can summarize key points in the book and try to entice viewers to read the book. Canva’s video editor and Adobe Creative Cloud Express are great tools for making book trailer videos.
• Have students design and publish their own online games based on the plot and characters of a book. Flippity offers great templates that students can modify to create their own online games.
• Students can use Google Earth to create virtual tour based on locations featured in a book. Students using the web browser version of Google Earth can include videos in the placemarks in their tours. Students who use Google Earth Pro can record audio narration for their entire tours.
• Consider using the choose-your-own-adventure model and have students write some alternate endings to a story. They can do this in Google Slides. Here’s a video about the process.

By the way, the picture I took of my daughter and her art project is a lot cuter than the cropped one in this blog post. Unfortunately, due to the plethora of shady sites that steal my work every day, I don’t include pictures of my kids’ faces in my posts anymore.