Dart Review & Book Reports Year 2

This past school year was my daughter’s 2nd year using Brave Writer Darts for Language Arts and we completed 9 literature book guides!

Today I’m sharing a review of all the books we completed and our book reports she did for each one.

If you are unfamiliar with what Brave Writer Darts are or how they work check out THIS blog post. This is the program she used for Language Arts (3rd & 4th grade) alongside Fix It Grammar. You can also check out our review of our first year and all the books we read HERE. We did different book reports for those books and I share more about it in that post if you are interested in seeing those too.

Last year I purchased each Dart individually and chose books I thought she would enjoy, or went along with our other studies. This past year I purchased the Dart Bundle for 2023-2024 and was very happy with all of the book choices. We enjoyed following the program and having her read books that maybe I wouldn’t have chosen for her, helping broaden her reading horizons!

The bundle had 9 book guides that we completed one per month, August-May (skipping the month of December.) Below I’ll share the books we read (an inside look) and our review of each. You can still purchase all of these guides individually as Literature Singles.

Book/Darts we completed:

There were so many favorites this year! Overall, there weren’t any bad books or ones we didn’t like. We loved so many of them it was hard to pick our favorites. Also keep in mind our favorites might be subjective based on personal interests, themes, etc. All of them are great choices if you are to read them!

My daughter said her top favorites were Odder, Ways to Grow Love, and The Adventures of Miss Petitfour. My favorites were Odder and Duet. Our least favorite book (if we had to choose one) was Julieta and the Diamond Enigma.

*Click on the book title to get to the Dart literature single guide. Click on the book photo for a link to purchase/read more about the book.

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Odder by Katherine Applegate

This was the sweetest story and who doesn’t love otters! This book is a little different as it is written in verse or stanzas, but it actually made it easier (and faster) to read.

It is about the life of a young otter on the California coast that becomes injured and taken to the Monterey Bay Aquarium program that pairs orphaned otter pups with surrogate mothers (based on a true story.) It was really charming and exciting to read. We are lucky enough to only live a few hours from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but if you don’t you can watch a live stream of the otter habitat on YouTube HERE! So fun to add along as you read this story and complete the Dart together! This Dart focused on learning about verse novels.

RA The Mighty Cat Detective by A.B. Greenfield

This book was a lot of fun and was a great early grade mystery. It did have a lot of characters that made it a bit tricky to keep track of, but they were a lot of fun and all important to the story. This would be a great book to focus on different characters and their similarities/differences.

This story is about a lazy pharaoh cat that becomes convinced by his best friend (a dung beetle) to help crack the mystery of a missing amulet. The mystery takes them all over the palace finding clues and meeting new characters. This Dart focused on learning about red herrings (misleading clues.)

Julieta and the Diamond Enigma by Luisana Duarte Armendariz

This book was not part of the bundle, but one that we were able to swap in place of a book from the bundle that we already read. This was our least favorite book of the year too. Nothing wrong with the story, it just seemed a little drawn out at times and didn’t catch the interest of my daughter. It might have been because it was too similar to the book we read right before, RA The Mighty Cat Detective. This book also focused on red herrings in the Dart guide.

This story is about a 9-year-old girl, named Julieta, that gets the opportunity to go to Paris with her father, who works for fine arts museums. When a priceless cursed diamond goes missing, her father is the main suspect, so Julieta needs to help find the thief to prove her father’s innocence.

*The book that was originally in the bundle that we previously read and switched was The Girl Who Stole an Elephant by Nizranna Farook. It is really good! Full of suspense and adventure! I definitely recommend that one over this one.

The Adventures of Miss Petitfour by Anne Michaels

The Adventures of Miss Petitfour is super fun and whimsical, very similar to a Mary Poppins type story. Miss Petitfour is a women who lives with 16 cats (who all have names!) and goes on different adventures every day based on the table cloth she chooses to fly around by. This was one of my daughter’s favorite books of the year. I think she enjoyed the silly adventures and cute illustrations. She also enjoyed that it didn’t consist of chapters, but instead 5 separate stories. This Dart focuses on what an intrusive narrator is.

Just Beyond the Very Very Far North by Dan Bar-el

We love these books and all these characters! We read the first book (The Very Very Far North) and completed the Dart last year; it was one of our favorites! These books in a nutshell: think Winnie-the-Pooh, but in the Arctic with Arctic animals. The chapters are a little long, but they are funny and have cute adventure stories. This Dart teaches all about personification and anthropomorphism.

Ways to Grow Love by Renee Watson

This was my daughter’s favorite book of the year, so much so, that she ended up reading the additional 3 books in the series all in the same month that we completed this Dart. I really enjoyed these books too and thought they taught some great lessons.

Ryan Hart goes to a summer sleep-away camp and learns how to share her best friend and to still be a friend to someone who isn’t a good friend to you. She’s learns to grow patience in many ways, face new challenges, and become a leader. This is a Christian based book and the Dart focuses on rhymes within writing.

Mr. Lemoncello’s Very First Game by Chris Grabenstein

I thought this book was a lot of fun, but it was my daughter’s favorite. Great story, just didn’t interest her in particular. This is definitely more up my son’s alley and he will be reading it next year.

This book is the “origin” story of the popular Mr. Lemoncello books. It is about Lemoncello as a young boy and finding his love/knack for creating and solving puzzles and games. He begins working at a small carnival with a world famous showman, Professor Marvelmous, and learns a lot. There is a treasure hunt and fun puzzles to crack all throughout the story. The Dart focuses on learning portmanteau which was a lot of fun!

Duet by Elise Broach

We really enjoyed this book! It was a simple storyline, written really well, and got us interested in learning more about Frederic Chopin. The book is narrated by a small goldfinch (very cute perspective) that lives outside the home of an old well-renowned music teacher. She gets a disgruntled kid to start playing for his lessons by singing along and helps him prepare for his music competition. You learn a lot about Chopin’s life history throughout the story and it was fun to turn on his music while reading this book together. It led my daughter to check out other biographies about him at the library and learn even more. The Dart focuses on lyrical language.

Big Foot and Little Foot by Ellen Potter

Big Foot and Little Foot was our last Dart of the year and was great to end because it was an easy read. Lots of fun illustrations and larger text. This was a cute story about a Sasquatch named Hugo who goes to school to learn how to be a proper Sasquatch when he really dreams of roaming free. He meets a human boy and they go on a big adventure learning about each other and different creatures around them. If you enjoy this book there are many more in the series! This Dart focuses on reading and creating maps.

*Note: Your children do not have to read these books independently! You can use them as read alouds and read to them, read it together, or follow along with an audiobook and physical copy. Lots more ideas on how we have read them for our Darts HERE.

Now that my daughter is older, she reads all of the books on her own, but I still read them myself so we could talk about the story together and I know what is going on. All of the books were very appropriately chosen for the age/grade level (8-10 years.)

Use THIS LINK to get a $10 off code to use on any purchase from Brave Writer!

Book Reports:

Last year my daughter completed a book report after reading each book to focus and learn the parts of a story (setting, characters, problem, solution, etc.) This year we did book reports again, but we focused more on the beginning, middle, and end and I had her write a small summary of each book. *These book report projects are NOT included in the Dart guides and you do not have to do them. I like having these projects to wrap up our unit on each book and get her to write a little more.

This year we did a super fun accordion book report out of envelopes, one for each book, and I love how it turned out!

How to make the accordion:

All you need is some large white letter-sized envelopes and a glue stick! *The envelopes with the triangle flaps work better than the rectangular edge flaps.

Take one envelope and open the top flap. Put glue on the entire flap and stick another envelope on top (opening facing the same direction.) Fold the flap of this envelope completely back, add glue, stick on another envelope. Open the flap, add glue, and stick on another envelope. Continue this process until you have as many envelopes as you need.

You can also watch a video of the glueing process HERE.

Completing each envelope:

When we completed the book for each Dart, I would have my daughter spend the next 2 days doing her book report. One day she would draw, color, and decorate the front of one envelope. She usually tried to copy the cover of the book or we looked up some simple art tutorials on YouTube (Art for Kids Hub.) Then we would sit down together and write some bullet points of important things that happened in each part of the story (beginning, middle, and end.)

The following day she would take our page of bullet points to help her write a simple summary of the story. I asked her to give as many details as possible and try her hardest on any spelling, grammar, etc. Then we would fold it up and stick it inside the envelope she decorated.

We did this once a month for each of the books she read and had a full accordion of book reports finished at the end of the school year that fold up so easy to store!

My son always watched her do these and really wants to do them himself next year! I will probably have him focus on the parts of the story by using this FREE PRINTABLE that we will fold up and put in each envelope instead.

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I hope this post gave you some fun ideas and great suggestions of books to read or Darts to complete!

Next year my daughter will be moving up to the next level called Arrow for ages 11-12. My son (going into 3rd grade) will be starting Dart for the first time. We decided not to purchase the new bundles for 2024-2025, but made our own list of new and old Literature Singles to complete next school year. I’ll be sharing all the Darts and Arrows we will be using on my Instagram next week!!

We are so excited for another year with Brave Writer and many more amazing stories read together!