It seems that book reports aren’t what they used to be. This month, Julia was tasked with reading and reporting on Pitcher Pressure by Jake Maddox. Instead of standing in front of the class to recite the dry facts about the settings, characters and plot of the book, her assignment was to invent a fictitious brand of breakfast cereal relating to the story and to design its product packaging.

Seeing as the story was set at a baseball game, Julia chose the prosaic name Bats ’N Balls for her cereal. She specifically asked whether she could use an apostrophe and N in place of “in”—she felt this was very important for the brand. We worked together to create an enticing box front and design a fun game for the back: I suggested a word search (figuring that the magic of the electronic personal computer could help us out), but Julia insisted on crafting a fill-in-the blanks puzzle with a secret message that spelled out the title of the book. The sides covered more familiar book report ground, and Julia did a great job on them on her own. You can see the final product in all its glory here.

Of course, merely creating a new product of out whole cloth wasn’t sufficient for a book report; this is the third grade, after all. To finish things up, Julia had to actually sell her creation by putting together a two-minute (give or take) commercial extolling its virtues. We won’t be able to attend her in-class presentation, but we recorded her final run-through at home for the sake of posterity.