Eighth graders in Michael Billotti’s English class at Merton Williams Middle School are working on “one pagers” to visually share key ideas and information from the books they are reading independently. Using a template, the students draw a border that represents the key themes. In the upper left corner go a quotation and image that represent the most important theme. Then in the upper right corner are images or words that represent the key characters. In the lower left corner, students show the author’s style of writing and lastly, in the lower right corner students illustrate the connections between the themes and ideas with what is going on in the world today.
Matthew Spreter created his one pager on the graphic novel New Kid by Jerry Craft. “It’s usually not what I read, but I thought I’d give it a try,” he said. “It’s an easy read, not groundbreaking, but good.”
Juliana Saporito read a second book in a series by Alan Gratz titled Ground Zero. “I like the author, so I wanted to read the whole series,” she said. “Ground Zero and Refugee are both interesting.”
“The one pagers are a different way to have the students synthesize the themes and imagery in the books they’ve chosen to read,” explained Billotti.
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