Get “All the Feels” With Emoji Booktalks

“All the Feels,” is an expression that has come to mean to experience deep feeling (Grammarphobia).  Identifying genres by the feelings they evoke is a quick and easy way to interest students in a book using this passive display technique.  Pair each book with the emoji of the feels it gives.  Take this a step further, and students create their own emoji booktalks to entice other students to read their favorite book.  

It all started on the Internet.  People posted book titles using emojis and everyone guessed what the book title was. 

It was so much fun trying to figure them all out!  (Find the answer key on the Paul Memorial Library Website.)  If you want to use an activity based on this concept,   The Book Wrangler has developed some FREE challenges that can be used in Elementary School Libraries.  

For upper grades, The Epic Reads website even went as far as telling whole book plots with emojis.  Here’s their summary of Divergent:

There are 140 in total!  Go to Epic Reads to see them all.

I got to thinking that emojis would be a really good way to passively booktalk a book by putting the emoji story next to the book.  

Here’s a display using a poster from Scholastic and emoji icons printed out from Emoji Island.  Print this slide show to make your own Emoji Booktalk Display.  

You  may even want to buy these emoji post its from Amazon if you want to save time, although the range of emojis is more limited.

The concept is simple, what are the feels you get from this book?  Funny books get the laughing or goofy icon, scary books get the skull or the scream, romance books get the heart eyes, sad books get the river of tears.    

I used this idea to have students create their own emoji booktalks using google slides.  Students incorporated the book cover with an emoji and one sentence explaining how the book made them feel.

Make a Copy of the Emoji Slide Show and share with your students to give them easy access to the emoji icons.  Here are some student samples grades 7-8 from my students at Lindsey Academy. 

Student booktalks can be printed out and used as shelf talkers, or shared as a google slide show to the class.  Once students have mastered this simple concept, they may be ready to create more complex #Booksnaps a book report format created by Tara Martin, and described in more detail by the Tech 4 School Librarians Blog.

Heather Gruenthal

Twitter @hgruenthal

CSLA Historian

Teacher Librarian, LBUSD

Lindsey Middle School and Stanford Middle School