By Connie Colvin I love books! For us as English teachers, books are probably a huge part of why we do what we do. This summer I tore through more than 20 books and enjoyed every page: everything from great thrillers like The Girl on the Train, YA books like 13 Reasons Why, fun mysteries like the Flavia de Luce series, and even a few professional books like Notice and Note. This summer my 11th-grade son tore through exactly one book and only because he was forced to for AP Summer Reading. I’m sure he isn’t alone. With school starting back for most of us any day, this is our chance to get good books back in the hands of our students, many of them reluctant readers. That’s where our classroom libraries come in. Whether it’s just a small collection of high interest novels you’ve gathered for SSR or an entire wall filled with exciting fiction and non-fiction organized by genre, classroom libraries are so important for offering kids easy, instant, daily access to quality books. Yes, most of our schools have a library, but the school library can be intimidating, inconvenient, or inaccessible for kids for a multitude of reasons. We love to read. We want them to love to read. Share your love by sharing books! When I started my job at the end of the 2014-15 school year, I inherited a tall tan bookshelf full of a very odd collection of male action hero novels and non-fiction coffee table books like The Making of Thriller. I took what I had and over the summer started building a collection that has become my favorite feature in my classroom. I love to add to it, I love to share what’s in it. These are some tips I’ve learned along the way. I had this huge, ugly shelf to fill, only a few salvageable books, a few months, and a budget. How to find cheap and free books my kids would be interested in reading? The first thing I did was put a plea out on Facebook asking for donations from friends with teenage kids. I had two high school girls clean out their rooms and quickly scored two big boxes of books! One of those girls, now in college, recently contacted me and told me she’s bringing me another box! Once my students found out I will put a sticker inside the book telling them who donated it to my library, I had several current students donate as well. One student gave me a complete, barely touched set of the Chronicles of Narnia last year he didn’t want anymore! Next I kept an eye out for church and library book sales, which happen several times a year in my town. Get there early for the best selection and enjoy! I do love book sales. Goodwill and the Salvation Army thrift stores sell books cheaply, as well. I hit my local Goodwill every couple of months and always find popular paper and hardbacks that are always wearing out like Harry Potter, the Twilight Series, The Hunger Games, Nicholas Sparks books and more. At $1.50 for hardbacks and $1 for paperbacks, it’s a goldmine. For SSR time during our homeroom advisory period, I like to have comic books on hand, as well. Our local comic shop will donate boxes of old comics to teachers for their classrooms, yours may well do the same or at least give them to you very cheaply. Finally, when I know what I want to buy (and I’ve usually always got a list going!), I go to ThriftBooks.com. Thrift Books sells used paper and hardback books starting at $3.79. You get free shipping with a $10 purchase, and every $50 you spend earns you $5 off your next order. They carry such a volume of most books, my colleagues and I have bought classroom sets of used novels at a great price. I quickly learned that 9th and 10th graders are hard on paperback books. They get dropped, shoved, crammed, and mauled in every which way. I’ve even had kids find them in the school bathroom. This is where putting your last name on the bottom edge of the book (and inside the front cover!) comes in great handy. I also found an online tutorial on how to cover paperbacks with clear contact paper, and I put my student assistant to work. If you want to save wear and tear on your books and not have to keep buying new copies, it’s definitely worth the effort. Read here how you can cover a book with clear plastic film, or if you prefer video, check this one out. Now you’ve got some great books and you’ve got them protected. How do you keep track of them? I have been happy doing it the old-fashioned way using a checkout binder that sits in a magnetic file organizer stuck to the side of my shelf. When my students want to check out a book, they write down the title, their name, the date, and their class period. I give students three weeks or so before I start checking up on them. While students are working independently in class, I will go around and ask about their progress in their books and chat with them about it. It’s a great chance for one on one conversations and sharing the book love. As long as they’re making progress, I let them keep the book out. Checking in with them also helps remind them to bring books back when they’re done, when they just enter the date they brought it back. Because I’m not militant about my book checkout, I find I do lose some books at the end of the year, especially the most popular titles. But I’m okay with that. Many of my students have very little access to books at home. I will happily donate a cheap book or five and I like to think someone is out there enjoying them. If you want to be more tech savvy, however, my colleague started using an online classroom library circulation app last year called Book Retriever and she has been very happy with it. She scanned all of her book barcodes in with her phone, then uses her phone during class to check out and receive returned books. The free app also allows her to track student reading habits and offers book leveling information. Because of the volume of books I have on my shelves and extras stashed in my closet, I haven’t taken the techno plunge yet. Something new I just discovered that I might add this year, however: color-coded genre stickers.
Once you’re ready to circulate your books, you need to get your students interested in checking them out. We talk about books a lot in my classroom. When kids hear what other kids are enjoying reading and the book is right in front of them, chances are good they are going to pick it up. I use book passes, book talks (both formal and informal), student-made book posters and interactive bulletin boards to drum up interest in my library. When I get new books, I show them off before I put them on the shelves. If we’re reading survival themed stories, I grab a stack of related novels and give impromptu book reviews. I’ll never forget the year-long argument one of my classes had over whether The Alchemist was a decent read or not. Every time a student finished it, those who had read it would ambush the newbie and demand answers. I’ve never had more book buzz than when I posted my 10th grade Honors students’ posters for the banned books they had chosen for their 3rd term independent reading novels. My 9th graders were fascinated with the concept of a banned book. It makes me excited just thinking about students getting excited about books! As I get back to work next week, I know my reading rate is going to plummet, but I’m hoping the opposite will be true for my students. I’m hoping I can excite a new group this year and hear them ask each other “what are you reading?” However you choose to get (and keep) good books back in front of your kids this fall, remember how you feel about reading and remember to share the book love. WVCTE is wondering what your classroom library looks like! What tips do you have for teachers just beginning to build their libraries? Which books fly off your classroom library shelves? How does independent reading play a role in your classroom? Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook! After being a stay-at-home mom for 14 years, Connie Colvin finally fulfilled her dream of becoming a high school English teacher in 2015 at the age of 40. She is beginning her third full year of teaching 9th and 10th grade English at Parkersburg High School. When she’s not teaching, Connie can be found long distance walking (while listening to an audiobook!) or knitting, crocheting, or sewing. She is thrilled to say having her eldest son in class (or, as he called it, Mom World) last year was a wonderful experience for both of them, and she hopes to have her youngest in class in 2018. She is working to gather a Wood County group of WVCTE’ers this fall.
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BY: LIZ KEIPER The bell rings. Freshmen begin to file into my room as they would any other day, expecting to start some Greek story called The Odyssey as I have hinted the previous day, but as they pass me at my door, they pause. Some of them smile, some of them comment, “Umm,” or, “Nice!” or, “What…?” but most of them just give me a strange look. Must be because their English teacher is wearing a toga. Since this is (unfortunately) a rare occurrence in their lives, upon entering the room, I do feel the need to explain my attire. I tell them that I’m wearing a toga because, “You have to wear a toga to go on a quest!” “Wait… we’re actually going on a quest?” they ask. “Yes!” I reply. “There will be obstacles and heroes and prizes to be won! Let’s go!” And I begin making my way to the Wellness Center, 30 squirrelly freshmen in tow. Little do they know that they will learn so much, and dare I say, more than they expected to learn, about quests. When we get to the large, enclosed gym-like space, I split the students up into groups. I have a set of three towels and a blindfold for each group on one end of the gym and a bed-sheet toga, piece-of-twine belt, and plastic laurel crown on the other end. I explain that, working in teams, their quest is to start out at their “home,” which is the end of the gym where they currently are, and to travel to the far end of the gym where one of them will become a Greek hero. However, the floor is hot lava, and in order to avoid losing body parts and such, they must travel on the magic lava-resistant towels that I have conveniently provided for them. Also, because this is a quest fashioned after epic tales, we need some archetypes, so I’m throwing in a blind character for good measure (we previously brainstormed archetypes and how they surface in modern culture the day before), so one character is going to be blindfolded, but they can’t step on the lava either. When the team reaches the other side on the towels, one character must don the toga and laurel crown, and after becoming a hero, like all good epic heroes, he or she must return to their home a changed person. Oh, and the group to do so first gets CANDY. So, get your GAME FACES ON, kids. Ready, set, GO! ***** I leave about 15 minutes at the end of the period for us to journey back to the classroom, bestow lolly-pops on the winners, and talk about our quest. As I’m handing out the victors’ spoils, I give them a few questions that they need to answer about the activity that they just did. “Questions?” they ask. “But, we were just competing for candy! We didn’t learn anything from that!” Oh, young grasshoppers, young grasshoppers… I pass out a paper to each student with the following questions:
Then we share their answers to number 4. Turns out that they were actually learning a whole lot about teamwork and their own role in the success or failure of a group, while during the activity, they thought that they were just competing for high fructose corn syrup on a stick. And actually, that’s the entire point of a quest. The quester learns something along the way, usually about him or herself, which they did not expect to learn at the outset. Here I must pause and give credit where credit is due. This concept of The Quest is heavily influenced by Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. If you have not read this book, drop whatever you are currently reading and read this because I promise that it will change the entire way that you think about symbolism and archetypes in literature and will add depth to your reading that will in turn impact your students. Foster claims in How to Read Lit that there are five main elements of any quest story:
Really, all quest stories involve these elements. Take for example, the movie Finding Nemo, which in fact I analyze as an exemplar with my class…
When we get to number five, a conversation ensues about what Marlin learns about himself through this experience. My students have come to the conclusion that he learns to not be overprotective, he learns to value what matters, he learns about appropriate boundaries, or he finally finds closure for his wife’s death and learns to forgive himself. Pretty cool for a kids’ movie about a fish. But that’s because it’s not just about a fish—it’s a quest. And these elements of the quest apply to most quest stories, from The Odyssey to The Canterbury Tales to the short film Home Sweet Home (which is also great to use to teach quests). This activity has opened up doors for my students in terms of preparing their minds to be looking for teachable moments throughout the story of The Odyssey. Instead of it just being a cool story about a hero defeating monsters, witches, and whirlpools, it becomes a tale of leadership, friendship, fallibility, temptation, choices, loyalty, and the struggle of man against fate and the natural world. My students begin looking for what Odysseus is learning, or if he truly learns from his adventures, and more importantly, what they can learn from them… in other words, themes of the story. At the end of the day, themes are what is important about literature anyway. I tell my students that the themes are the good stuff—if you’re not reading to learn something about life from a story, what’s the point? English class isn’t just about who did what in a story; it’s about what the author is trying to say about life through what the characters do. So, if I can set the stage for my students to contemplate themes and big ideas throughout The Odyssey by giving them some lava-resistant towels, a plastic laurel crown, and some candy, it’s well worth it. And of course, I get to wear a toga while I’m at it. Because Toga Tuesdays are the best. WVCTE is wondering… 1)How do you engage students with themes in a text? 2)How would or could you adapt this idea to connect with a text that you teach? Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook! By Toni Poling I am a reader. My house has more books in it than some libraries. I am frequently knocking over a stack of books from the top of my night stand in my desperate attempts to silence my alarm in the morning. I enjoy reading books on my iPad, but if I really like a book I will buy a hardcopy so that I can loan it to others. I read indiscriminately; I read incessantly; I read passionately – just the way I want my students to read. As the parent of a soon-to-be second grader (he is counting down the days!), I can honestly say that the elementary school teachers do a fantastic job of creating a culture of literacy in our schools. From brightly colored word walls to bins overflowing with books to accelerated reader charts, our younger students are surrounded by a world that revolves around literacy. One of my son’s best moments this year was when he achieved the reading goal he had set for himself. How we celebrated! So, what happens between elementary school and high school that dampens this enthusiasm for reading the written word? Kelly Gallagher has a theory. In Readicide, Gallagher describes what he calls “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” Ouch! I must admit that the first time I read that I was rather offended. How could this respected educator blame me for my students’ lack of interest in reading? Then I thought about how I was assessing my students’ reading. Was I assessing for learning? Were my assessments authentic? Did they help students make meaning through the texts we were reading? The answers were all, unfortunately, no. Time to make a change. For years, my students had been reading student choice books (we can all agree that choice books are vitally important, can’t we?), but my assessment method was lacking. Some students dutifully read the book to get the grade; others tried to fake their way through the assignment. Neither fulfilled my English teacher’s desire to create lifelong readers. I was at a loss on what to do about this, until I started getting subscriptions of The New Yorker for my classroom. If you aren’t a fan of The New Yorker magazine, you should be! Not only is it a source of entertainment, it’s a treasure trove of contemporary literature! The cover of each issue is a beautiful example of visual text and my students and I spend time each month analyzing the meaning of the cover. I’ve even used covers as visual sources for essays in AP Language. Inside each issue is an original short story, sometimes by a well-known author, and original contemporary poetry. These are usually great sources for AP Literature. Perhaps my favorite part of The New Yorker, however, is the monthly book review. It’s my go-to source for finding new books and new authors and has been for years. When I started utilizing the magazines in my classroom, I also found that my students were reading these same book reviews and making reading choices based on them! When it was time for our next student choice book, I decided to utilize a mentor text to provide guidance for a new assessment model. My students were going to write book reviews in the style of The New Yorker. Each student received a handout with guidelines and a rubric, along with one of four sample book reviews from the magazine. Students were placed in cooperative learning groups based on which sample they had received and the groups did a close reading of the book review. They were looking specifically for summary/synthesis, analysis, and personal connection to the text. Students used different colored highlighters to identify the three main parts of the book review. As a whole group, we looked at each’s group’s work under the document camera and discussed what was different about each sample and what was similar. Then students wrote their own book review on their student choice novel. Admittedly, the first try at this was a little...rough. Students wanted to fall into the old trap of ending the book review with “everyone should read this book!” It took a couple of rounds of rewrites before we were all satisfied with the final products, but those final drafts were really good! Not only did students mimic the quality writing found in their mentor text, they also showed true engagement with their book and a depth of analysis that had been lacking from previous assignments. This assessment was truly an assessment for learning.
Since this first round, I have refined the assignment based on needs of individual classes. Some classes need more instruction in the analysis portion while others struggle with the elevated syntax and diction expected in the assignment, but they are ALL reading, and isn’t that the goal? Perhaps, however, the most unexpected reward from this assignment is that other students are making reading choices based on their peers’ book reviews. They are learning from one another. They are modeling excellent literacy skills for their peers. They are becoming readers. WVCTE is wondering how you assess for your students’ learning while maintaining a culture of literacy in your classroom. Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook! By Shana Karnes I can be a bit of a lazy reader. I get impatient while reading, waiting for the plot to pick up, and abandon books with gusto. I leap from mystery to mystery, romance novel to short fiction, and toss in the stray nonfiction book when I’m feeling curious. When I first began making choice reading a priority in my classroom, many of my students were lazy readers, too. They gobbled up YA fiction in droves, but balked when I booktalked a classic, or an award-winning piece of fiction, or any nonfiction. Some of them refused to move beyond their genre of choice for a whole year. I knew, when I committed to choice reading, that it went far beyond just YA. I knew that all kids were capable of reading sophisticated texts, making complex choices about when and how and what to read, and that all readers have a hunger for a challenging, engaging read. But I wasn’t seeing my students living out those expectations, so I built in some structures to help them get there. Reading Challenges -- I began scaffolding students up to more difficult reading choices with reading challenges. I read about these in Book Love by Penny Kittle, but wanted to put my own spin on them as far as making very specific challenges went. So, the first reading challenge involved picking a book outside your comfort zone (which required a fun day of work identifying our own reading zones); the second challenge involved reading a nonfiction book, the third involved reading an award winner, and so on. By working as a whole class to try new books out simultaneously--me reading along with my students--everyone felt comfortable getting uncomfortable. We were all struggling along together, trying to decipher the vocabulary in a new book, or the structure of a new genre, or the style of a new kind of writer. I built in mini-lessons on these things, but I think it was most helpful that we talked about these issues in the light of being real readers--not “struggling” readers. Authentic Writing about Reading -- When I first joined GoodReads many years ago, I realized how much my reading life was improved by just quickly taking the time to rate what I’d thought of a book. Before that, I’d start and finish books and never really think about them again. Soon, I began writing short book reviews, and then long ones, first just for myself, and then for the benefit of other readers. I began reading more book reviews to get a sense of what I might talk about other than writing and characters. I wanted my students doing something similar, so we began studying book reviews--popular, funny ones on Goodreads and Tumblr; professional ones in the New York Times and the New Yorker; even famed reviewers like Roger Ebert, whose writing moves about film we applied to books. Students began tweeting at authors, writing reviews informally in their notebooks and formally for our school paper and "giving their own booktalks to one another. Nurturing a Real Reading Life -- No longer were kids feeling confined to books I handed them. They began to choose books more independently, armed with information about their tastes, their peers’, and what was popular in general. I began to see more students reading books that didn’t come from my classroom library, more students talking to one another about books, and a bigger variety of books being read in general. In my own reading life, I modeled these challenges. I read The Great Gatsby, Walden, and a few other classics for the first time in years, and truly appreciated them more during these second reads. I wrote book reviews on Goodreads, the Nerdy Book Club, and Three Teachers Talk. I tracked my reading in my notebook, on GoodReads, and on Twitter, setting goals and trying to take a moment to jot down, in quick review form, WHY I liked or didn’t like a book. These practices not only helped me become a better reader; they helped my students grow as readers, too. Anna’s favorite book of all time became the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, while Connor was blown away by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. These books and more were chosen, read, and evaluated independently, without the confines of assignments or the too-broad sea of “your choice” to hold them back. WVCTE is wondering how you start your students with choice and then scaffold them up to more complex reading tasks. Leave us a comment, tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!
Shana Karnes teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or find more of her writing about secondary readers-writers workshop at Three Teachers Talk. by Dr. Louise McDonald I teach middle school, which means I teach some students who are ready for college and others whose reading got stuck in fourth or fifth grade and who need a good reason to move forward. “Tricks and tips” then, from middle school teachers, have to be taken with a grain of salt—they work some of the time with some of the students. Anticipating what will work without experimenting is an inexact science. Discussions of Common Core have often focused on non-fiction texts, but literary source material is also excellent for teaching many of the skills outlined in the core. Poetry for middle school I taught at a university for many years and used to have a great time teaching poetry, but when I reached middle school I hesitated to do more with poetry than basically treating it like any other complex text to decode. One of the easiest ways for the students to access poetry is through lyrics. They know lyrics, learn lyrics, and value them already. I really like Paul Gallipeau’s lesson as an introduction to rap as poetry. It can be found here: http://www.paulcarl.com/teaching-poetry-through-rap/ . He brings literary language to rap music as tools that can then be carried on to use with more canonical work. His lesson plan can be downloaded from the site above, but before you do, pause in the middle of Paul’s blog or watch below Alkala’s TED talk on rap and Shakespeare; which connects Shakespeare, which students often read as inaccessible, to hip hop, in convincing and joyful ways. Once you convince students to read poetry as well as listen to it, they are ready to take some poems in as friends. I cast about for methods for putting together a whole essay using the literary language, until I found this video from Isabella Wallace somewhere in Australia. The kids have a great time with Ms. Wallace’s accent and her wayward hairdo and they don’t seem to worry too much that her target audience is older than middle school. They are very intimidated by poetry and like a tangible technique. I have them bring in lyrics from their favorite songs to practice the method before we go on to literary canon. Performance is another great way to approach poetry in middle school. I have the students pick among poems that I select in a variety of levels and perform for the class. It is useful to learn some poetry yourself to perform, and there are great poetry slams on youtube. One of my favorite performances is by the Canadian poet Shane Koyczan. It inspired a number of students to perform this poem themselves! This is even more remarkable when you see the poem: it has more than 100 lines! Once the students have analyzed poetry and performed it, I ask them to write some. Of course, they are happier and more successful if they take another work as a model. Maya Angelou has a number of poems that make great models and I guide their writing by asking them to write poems about tangible things at first. The first poem I assign is about someone who is important to them, the second about something they like to do, and the third about the kind of person they want to be. Strangely, these were their favorite assignments of the whole year, when the time came to evaluate at the end. They liked finding out that they “had something to say.” One of the most important aspects of converting skeptical middle school students to poetry is to bring a lot of enthusiasm. They may laugh at your verve, but it gives them permission to feel the electricity of a good poem themselves. If you feel the need for some inspiration, try the Academy of American Poets selection: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/anthology/popular-poems-teach Reading poetry is different than reading prose and I find students are not confident, so it is an unlikely equalizer—which all by itself, is valuable in not only a middle school classroom, but any classroom! WVCTE is wondering... How do you approach poetry with your students? What poems work? What activities make poetry click? Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook! Louise received a BA in political Science and International Relation from Carleton College and her PhD in Enlish/Composition, Rhetoric and Literacy. She taught at various universities until 2009, when she started teaching ELA at a middle school in Jefferson County. She finds middle school to be the perfect laboratory for learning about literacy and teaches some stuff there too! Louise serves as Secretary and as a member of the Executive Committee of WVCTE. By Dr. Louise McDonald I teach middle school, and like all of us, confront classrooms with students who read (per the STAR test) as well as college students, and others that test at the third grade level. Circumventing the issue of test validity, many of us who teach at this level find that reading is a barrier to the types of lessons on literary analysis and source citation that the curriculum requires. When I started teaching middle school, I came from twenty years of teaching at the university level. I was surprised to hear students tell me that they had learned to read in third grade, didn’t need to do it now, and to stop treating them like babies. I was surprised when they insisted that they had read a passage, but couldn’t tell me what had happened. Were they not paying attention? Couldn’t they read at all? Were they uncooperative? Did they not understand the vocabulary? My internal conversation, I soon found, echoed a conversation that university professors of freshman students have every year. “The papers from 101 are abysmal!” they say to each other “What are they teaching in high school? How come they can’t [fill in the blank]?” Do students really become less prepared every year? Or look younger? Recent research has found that as we get farther away from learning those skills ourselves (dare I say, older?), we forget our own ignorance—we even forget how much last year’s class had to learn before they got as smart as they were when we released them at the end of the year. I don’t remember learning to read at all—certainly not the early levels. Reading was a joy and passion before I knew it. How can I understand what my struggling students feel? Let me explain. Did you take high school Spanish? Try reading this Noble Prize-winning poem by Pablo Neruda. Really read it. Don’t just look at it and stop when you find it is in Spanish and you “don’t read” Spanish: Juventud Un perfume como una ácida espada de ciruelas en un camino, los besos del azúcar en los dientes, las gotas vitales resbalando en los dedos, la dulce pulpa erótica, las eras, los pajares, los incitantes sitios secretos de las casas anchas, los colchones dormidos en el pasado, el agrio valle verde mirado desde arriba, desde el vidrio escondido: toda la adolescencia mojándose y ardiendo como una lámpara derribada en la lluvia. "Juventud" from Canto General, 1950 Published in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda Edited and translated by Ben Belitt Copyright © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2009 If, like me, you are not fluent in Spanish, you can make out some of the nouns. Certainly there are cognates and words that we have picked up in English, so “camino” and “perfume” and “erotica” stand out. “Juventude” looks a bit like “juvenile.” You can identify the sequence of clauses. But would you be able to “analyze”? When you read the above carefully, how does it make you feel? Powerful and confident? Like I am silly for asking something like this? Are you ready to go on to the next blog post because this one isn’t any fun? Try the translation: Youth Acid and sword blade: the fragrance of plum in the pathways: tooth's sweetmeat of kisses, power and spilth on the fingers, the yielding erotic of pulps, hayricks and threshing floors, clandestine recesses that tempt through the vastness of houses; bolsters asleep in the past, the bitter green valley, seen from above, from the glasses' concealment; and drenching and flaring by turns, adolescence like a lamp overturned in the rain. "Youth" from General Song, 1950 Published in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda Edited and translated by Ben Belitt Copyright © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2009 The literary analysis writer in me gets pretty charged about this poem—wow! Doesn’t it speak to the universal experience of middle school? Look at the great images and the repetition of ideas of discovery and secrecy! OK, so maybe the example is extreme. I don’t read Spanish easily, and Neruda is not “easy” Spanish. But my point is that reading when you do not understand is not fun and the temptation to quit is undeniable. What about English? What about this first paragraph of Hamilton’s Federalist Papers:
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison
Posting Date: December 12, 2011 [EBook #18] Release Date: August, 1991 Last Updated: July 10, 2004 Not fair! you say. This is a blog post to be read on a summer’s afternoon, not a puzzle to be untangled under a fluorescent glare in class. Reading slowly and carefully, paraphrasing in your head as the sentences get longer and longer and the clauses mount – the inward toss of the head as to the futility of soldiering on… this is what some of our students feel when you give them Rick Riordan or J.K. Rowling. It feels like work; like digging a ditch when the blisters start popping. So how to reach them, when they say they “don’t read” and everything you do suggests this to be true? Yeah, that’s the trick. Here are some thoughts: 1. Give them sounds rather than text. OK, you say, but idle hands make mischief. I have lots of luck asking them to illustrate a scene from a book as it is read—either by them or by me—or by Jim Dale. Even if they just “doodle” their concentration improves. 2. Give them choices. Have students read one of, say, four books that are available. Have the students schedule their group’s reading over a certain number of weeks. I find students are less anxious when the bulk of graded work is independent, but make the groups responsible for some kind of responses/presentations together. Reading with friends and not just assigned groups has some difficulties for the teacher, but friendship compensates for the work and gives them something to discuss. 3. Read together. Make time for independent silent reading. And then talk about what you are each reading. Model it by reading a great YA book yourself. I like making a big circle and talking about books and characters periodically. Get excited! 4. Write stories. Yes, I know, standards in the eighth grade do not include writing stories, but students are so out of touch with the creative process that digging into a character they have invented themselves can really inspire them. If you hit a wall with this, sometimes writing fan fiction is a good way to differentiate. It is a great way to teach elements of narrative and work on transitions and sequencing. What makes you want to read a passage like the one from the Federalist Papers above? Well, being interested in history is a help, but if you aren’t? Make a game. For example, have three students paraphrase a difficult passage with “two truths and a lie.” Then have the students individually or in groups choose which one is the lie. The possibilities are endless and teachers do them all the time. Sometimes they “take,” and sometimes not. Often, we are swimming upstream in a torrent of negative internal discourse. I think the “take home” here is that reading can be difficult and therefore vaguely distasteful—sometimes not so “vaguely.” One of the most important gifts we can give our reluctant readers is the experience and then the memory of finding something joyful in reading. WVCTE is wondering...How do you engage reluctant readers? What texts and strategies are reliably effective? Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook! Sources Kelly Gallagher and Cris Tovani. Louise received a BA in political Science and International Relation from Carleton College and her PhD in Enlish/Composition, Rhetoric and Literacy. She taught at various universities until 2009, when she started teaching ELA at a middle school in Jefferson County. She finds middle school to be the perfect laboratory for learning about literacy and teaches some stuff there too! Louise serves as Secretary and as a member of the Executive Committee of WVCTE. |
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