I hope you had a safe and restful new year. We begin our year with book reviews. We will be writing reviews of our favorite books, reading new ones and reviewing those. The students will be using their critical eye to evaluate literature. 
We will be using the website bookopolis.com to provide us with a save and easy framework to organize our ideas and share it with each other. Rachel Goldberg, who is in charge of our school library, is helping us through this literary adventure. If you have not received the email about Bookopolis, she writes,
"I hope this note finds you well. I'm writing with news about Bookopolis, a new tool that the 3-4s will be using in their classes. We're very excited to introduce students to this secure social network for children to share book reviews and recommendations with friends (at first, within the class and eventually, within the larger Bookopolis community, but never with the general public). We learned about the site through the American Association of School Librarians' annual list of Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, a trusted resource in web tools for the classroom. An alternative source would be: https://custom-writing.org/blog/36-best-websites
Bookopolis will give students an authentic audience (other kids) for which to write book reviews, share recommendations, and a way to learn about new titles that their friends are reading. We will also use Bookopolis as a vehicle through which to teach digital citizenship skills, including security (creating usernames and passwords); online communication with others (writing messages to friends and sending recommendations); and writing for a particular audience (what to include and what not to include). Plus, the kids can earn badges for writing reviews, adding books to their shelves, and sharing recommendations with friends. We think it's going to be a lot of fun for them.
As the teachers who created their accounts, we have the ability to monitor all of their activity on the site. I created user names for all of the kids. Their usernames do not contain their names (only initials and numbers) and no other identifying information about the children is shared on the site (such as school name, location, etc.). If you're interested in logging in to your child's Bookopolis account, we're happy to share login information with you.
We will be doing three types of writing activities in Bookopolis: Book Buzzes (short snippets that will be seen only by classmates); Book Reports (longer writing assignments that will only be seen by the teacher); and Book Reviews (which will be reviewed by the teacher and by a member of the Bookopolis staff to make sure that they are appropriate to be shared with the entire Bookopolis community). None of these activities will be available to the general public.
If you have questions or would like to learn more, please don't hesitate to reach out. We're planning to start using this with the kids within the next week.
Thanks very much,"
Many of the students are very excited about their Bookopolis accounts and are filling them up with the books they have read, are reading, and want to read.
We are also working with Nicola's Books. They have offered to let us come to their store where they have a huge box of advanced reader books. These are books that a publisher sends out for those in the literary community to read before they are published in order to create a buzz about the book. They will give us books to read if we write a review of the book for them to put on their website. While all students will be required to write a review, submitting it to Nicola's will be optional and with parental consent.
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