Trade Books and Book Trailers: The Little Raindrop

What is a book trailer you may ask? A book trailer is "a visual representation of a book. In one way book trailers are similar to a movie trailer; they are designed to interest a reader in a particular book" (Chance & Lesense, 2012). For my book trailer I focused on the book The Little Raindrop by Joanna Gray. This book is colorful and engaging to students while it walks them through the steps of the water cycle. It's main character is raindrop. This book could easily be done as a read-aloud and have the students infer what they think will happen to the raindrop. A lesson like this could easily be made into an inquiry based lesson using the 5E model.




Engage: To engage the students, a book trailer will be played.

• The purpose of the book trailer is to tease the students about what they are about to read. Ultimately, the students should want to immediately read the book after watching the book trailer. 

Explore: In the explore stage, the students would briefly be taught the stages of the water cycle.
Explain: In the explain stage, students can read the book in groups or have the book read aloud to them. Any time they see the raindrop go through a new stage they could write it down, raise their had, put their finger on their nose, etc.
Elaborate: In the elaborate stage, students could draw their own version of the water cycle. They would have to label the different phases and briefly explain what happens in each.
Evaluate: In the evaluate stage, students will get the chance to present their water cycles to the class and explain how the raindrop in the story passed through their water cycle.

I personally believe that a similar activity could be done with any trade book at any grade level. This particular book is suitable for grades K-2. I definitely plan on making more book trailers in my future career. I believe it is a great way to engage students as well as incorporate technology into the classroom. With older students, I would encourage them to create their own book trailers instead of the same old book report or test assignments.

To create my book trailer, I used Animoto. Animoto puts together text, pictures and video segments to make one long video. I personally believe that it us user friendly. The only downfall is that it isn't free. Some other tools that could be used to create a book trailer are iMovie, Keynote, Voicethread, Garageband, and Vimeo.

So all in all, book trailers have many uses in the classroom. I am very happy to have gotten the chance to make one.

Works Cited:
Chance, R.,  & Lesesne, T. (2012). Rethinking reading promotion: Old school meets technology. Teacher Librarian, 39(5), 26-28