Book Review Wall: Downloadable Elements
This project is titled “A Celebration of our 3rd Grade Book Clubs” and was undertaken at the conclusion of the Teachers’ College Reading & Writing Workshop Character Unit. This design was created to take advantage of our cinder block walls, with one Character Trait or Book Review placed on their own block. (Our blocks measure 8×16.)
The book review wall was created by Amy Ritchey, 3rd Grade Teacher at Parson Hills Elementary, in Springdale, Arkansas, with the help of her fellow 3rd grade teammates. She can be reached at [email protected]. You are also invited to connect with Amy via her LinkedIn profile. All are invited!
The graphic design aspect of this project was created by Amy’s husband, Adam, who is the President and Creative Director of InterraMedia, a graphic design firm located in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He can be reached via [email protected].
If you have any questions please feel free to reach out. And best of luck in creating your own Book Review Wall!
Oh, yeah, please, please, please send us photos of your Book Review Walls!!!
Best,
Adam & Amy
Headline
This PDF file contains the headline “What Type of Character Do You Like to Read About?” It will print on 12 standard 8.5×11 sheets of paper, with a 1-inch overlap, so you can tape the entire thing together. Fully assembled, it is about 9-feet wide. (Please be aware the document contains crop-marks to help you cut the paper down.)
Book Covers
Our book covers were downloaded from the internet, then re-sized to print in a standard 4×6 photo. For our project, we simply uploaded all the covers to the closest Walgreens Photo lab and picked them up later. If you find a coupon code, it’s very inexpensive. I believe our photo printing costs were under $5 for the entire project.
Important: The 4×6 photos were then backed with 5×7 colored paper, color-coded to match the character traits highlighted in the book.
The Character Traits
We printed our character traits as large as possible, using two pieces of paper taped together. These were then cropped down to 8×16, which is the size of the cinder blocks on our school’s walls. We only used 5 traits for our wall, but we’re happy to provide you with the following download with 18 over-sized Character Traits including: Brave, Smart, Silly, Happy, Sad, Lonely, Angry, Wild, Funny, Determined, Adventurous, Imaginative, Creative, Strong, Fearless, Helpful, Clumsy, and Honest.
Book Reviews
Our 3rd Grade Book Club students wrote some wonderful book reviews (typically 6-10 sentences long). We printed them in a 5×7 text box on light gray paper. The light gray helps the reviews pop out from the background wall color just a bit. We also adjusted the font size in each one to maximize the font for ease of reading. The 5×7 size matches the 5×7 size of the book covers. To help you plan this out, we’ve created this helpful little PDF below.
The Overall Appearance
We chose 5 character traits, then sought out 5-8 book reviews per trait to fill out the wall. There is no need to have exactly the same amount of reviews for each trait. Use tape to connect the colored character trait blocks to the reviews which match. (The reviews should also be color coded.)