Here's my brief review of it.
The site's creator is Andy Fine, a School Library Media specialist from Minnesota. He states that SlimeKids is" a site built for students that provides easy access to excellent literacy-related resources, has a variety of reading-based games with bona fide educational value and contains a large collection of book trailers organized by year and by grade level. "
The target audience is middle elementary to lower secondary, years 3-8. The appearance of the site is simple, unsophisticated and would have some appeal to elementary students. Teens might find it less appealing, a bit young. There is some advertising at the side which is not too intrusive.
Book trailers are accompanied by a plot summary and brief author biography. Not too much, which is good for the reluctant readership that this site would appeal to. Many of the books selected have high-interest levels that would hook boys who are reluctant readers. Grade range indicators for the trailers seem misleading. For example, Ship breaker, Maze runner have a keen readership up to age 16 here in my library. These are assigned Grades 3-6. There is an archive of books through the years, for each grade level, but this less appealing (copyright concerns using the covers?) and I found to be not age appropriate.
There is a lack of attribution that concerns me. Book trailers I checked out are created by others (found on YouTube) without attribution. eg. Ship breaker. Similarly, literacy games are embedded without attribution. The Authors tab and Book Reviews link to other useful sites, but are the Search engines and Reference pages appropriate or necessary? I decided not to share this with my secondary students on my Into Reading guide.
On the other hand, I do link to Book drum - beyond the page from my reading promotion guide.
A social networking site for books and readers, not unlike Goodreads, pitched at a teenage audience. Unknown contributors build a set of resources around a book.
Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
Summary: objective synopsis of the book
Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
Readers can create a personal profile and begin contributing.The site is hosted by Facebook, so that may present some problems if your school blocks Facebook. My school does but I was still able to access Book drum without impediment, although with some access warnings.
From the home page, links are provided to a number of resources built around common set-texts.Although not authoratative, I shared the resources for The Road with my senior English students who are studying this text. They provide some useful background information and the visual elements enhance the text. Video is also used, and music is integrated with Spotify, although not supported in some juridictions including Singapore.
I like this site and will promote it to my students for reading inspiration. For some, the further opportunities to share responses and links and for online engagement with other avid readers will provide that dialogue about books that they enjoy.
Hi Linda,
ReplyDeleteThis is Andy Fine from SlimeKids. Thanks for your review of the site!
I did just want to clarify a couple of things. Both of the titles you mentioned, The Maze Runner and Ship Breaker, I have designated as high-low books. This is why I don't feature them on the grade level pages, but instead on the high-low page: http://www.slimekids.com/book-trailers/grade/high-low.html
If you read the following page,
http://www.slimekids.com/book-trailers/book-trailer-levels.html
....you can see my explanation of high-low--that the grade levels shown for those titles do not usually reflect the intended or typical readership for those books, so it would make sense that you have teenage readers checking out those books.
And to be clear, there are no book trailers on the site embedded from youtube, and all trailers that are embedded from other sites are done correctly. Also, I don't know if you were aware, but several of the most popular games on the site, such as Grammar Bee, are self-created, original games. These games are featured on many other websites without any specific attribution to me. I actually encourage this because the purpose of these games was that they should get played! There's a new game that involves learning about root words called Root Collector that is almost completed and will be up on the homepage soon.
Thanks again for your interest in SlimeKids and for sharing it with others.