Working in teams, have students come up with themes or ideas that relate to your current topic. Give the students only a few minutes and designate one person from each group to be the scribe. To make it harder, challenge students to come up with a theme that starts with each letter of the alphabet. Using the same game, you can also ask students to come up with similarities and differences between two books. Teams earn points based on how many quality ideas they come up with.
Students that clam up at the idea of answering questions on a written or oral book report will get excited about using their creativity to accomplish the same task in a more dynamic form. Give students a basic template to use based on a simple trivia game where players advance based on correct responses on a playing board. Let them decorate their game and come up with the questions on their own.
Using the main ideas from games like Pictionary or charades, students can develop skills like paraphrasing main ideas and summarizing. Have the student orally summarize the scene or theme he depicted after he draws or acts it out. You can also have students draw pieces of paper out of a hat that contain themes, ideas or characters from several books you’ve read throughout the year. Students have to quickly come up with which book the idea refers to in order to get points for their team. Middle school students also love playing Jeopardy, which can help them focus on more specific details about a book or chapter, or can be great for an overall review at the end of a term.
Have a student reads a short story aloud to the class, which is divided in to teams. The students then have three minutes to come up with three words that best describe the general idea of the story. To make the game harder, ban certain words or words that start with certain letters. You can also have students try to guess the words that a selected student came up with.
Slowly read a book out loud to your students. Have students raise their hands if they detect foreshadowing and give prizes to any that can predict what will happen next. For a quieter version of this game, have students write down their predictions for the next page silently as you read, offering prizes to students who come up with the closest response. You could also make this game more imaginative, offering a prize for the person with the most creative response.