Top Student Novel Picks for 2016

When my district switched our classroom websites to Blackboard, I lost years of student book recommendations.

So as one of the last assignments, I asked my ninth graders to pick their favorite independent novel from this year and write one sentence why they liked it. So you can stock your classroom libraries for next year, the top vote-getters with unedited rationales follow.

The Wake series by Lisa McMann–“It was a good book with a good plot.”

I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak– “I liked it because it made you think about who it could be.”

Denton Little’s Death Date by Lance Rubin — “It made you think, and it was hilarious.”

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher– “It had a lot of suspense and I liked how the girl had recorder everything before she died.”

Paper Towns by John Green– “The concept was different and the plot never gets boring. And it’s very popular.”

Ones that I couldn’t believe didn’t make the list but were continuously checked out of my classroom library–

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo– Magic, adventure, a heist, romantic undercurrents, mystery. Fans of Eragon, Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, etc.  will devour this.

Bone Gap by Laura Ruby–Mystery, fantasy, kidnapping, identity, and a cool twist. After the students left, the teachers took my copies and are passing them around for the summer.

Snitch, Street Pharm, and Takedown by Allison Van Diepen–Three different books about drugs, gangs, and things like that. My reluctant readers especially eat these up and then pass them to their friends. By far, my most stolen books. And in my world, that’s the highest form of praise.

There you go. Read a couple this summer. Stock your library. I think I’ll try this again next year but require two sentences for the rationale, since these turned out so vague. I’m adding new books to my September book talk but keeping these popular ones, so I’m interested to see what makes the list next year.

Ciao. Happy reading.

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2016 Summer Reading Stack

I’ve got some traveling planned, so I amped up this year’s stack to 13 including one I didn’t get to last summer because of reasons. Summer is short, so my action figures may need to help me speed read. I try to mix up the list between classic, YA, novels, and teacher stuff.

First up: The Meursault Investigation— Kamel Daoud (A sequel of sorts to The Stranger)

…followed by, in no particular reading order–

No Exit–Jean-Paul Sartre

Hell Hole–Gina Damico

Choke–Chuck Palahniuk

The Girl with All the Gifts–M.R. Carey (a student recommended this one)

The Sun Also Rises–Ernest Hemmingway

Bite Me–Christopher Moore

The Drowning Girl –Caitlin R Kiernan

Gone–Michael Grant (I feel bad I haven’t read this yet)

You–Caroline Kepnes

Ditch That Textbook–Matt Miller

The Sculptor–Scott McCloud (graphic novel)

Illuminae–Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

 

Follow on goodreads to get reviews all summer long.

Teaching Shakespeare 400 Years After

Last week a local station broadcast a segment where I was interviewed about teaching Shakespeare.

http://www.wboc.com/clip/11853746/shakespeare-no-more

Clearly, my entire rationale and unit plan couldn’t fit into those 2+ minutes that made it on air. And that was not what that audience wanted anyway.

Current philosophies and time constraints suggest eliminating Bill’s works or scaling them down to just a couple monologues.  However, teaching at least one of his entire plays at some point in each high school can benefit students for several reasons.

• The number of literary techniques you can introduce/analyze in one work is amazing.  Plot structure, poetry devices, characterization, all the ironies and metaphors… They’re all there. In one unit you can incorporate a ridiculous amount of literary stuff that you’re going to teach anyway.
• And certainly as a root of modern storytelling, the Bard’s stories allow you to tie ins to most modern movies and books.

But there is way more that makes kids use those higher order thinking skills you are evaluated on.

• There’s all that ambiguity that forces kids to figure out things for themselves. Is Hamlet’s ghost real?  Is it always real? Is it a good ghost or a demon? I don’t know. Make the students need to decide.
• Text complexity. It’s harder to read than modern works. We called it “decoding, in the video” but edu-lingo calls it increasing lexile level. Students learn to read hard things by reading hard things. And reading English form 400 years ago is like learning a foreign language.
• College readiness. When I do presentations on reaching reluctant readers, inevitably there’s a college professor in the crowd who asks me about increasing text endurance. Some professors blame high school teachers for not preparing/requiring students to read long, difficult pieces. Shakespeare fits that bill nicely.

If you want to hook the kids and keep your own sanity, try a couple of these things that work in my room.

• Vary how they read.  Do some individually, some as a class, some in pairs or groups. Give them big questions to answer.  Witches in stories like Macbeth always give cryptic answers to the protagonist’s questions. Quote the answers and explain how they could go badly. Think of questions they the kids have to work together to figure out.
• Show them the video as you go. Or be a rebel and show different scenes played out in different films. (Romeo and Juliet’s options are: classic, modern, singing, zombies, and gnomes.) Then ask what is different in the movies versus the text. And why? Why do directors cut Paris’s death? Doesn’t that mess up the symmetry Shakespeare set up? Hamlet is so long, nearly every director slices large chunks.  Ask the students why.
• Acting.  There’s no time to act out the whole play.  That would kill a whole marking period.  Give groups important scenes of 100 lines or so. You will need to do some prep here counting characters and choosing where to start scenes.  Give them one period (we have 90-minute classes) to plan: assign and practice lines, block out where to, add actions, make props…whatever. For added difficulty, some groups may have more parts than actors, so they’ll need to figure  out how to solve that problem. After they perform, they have to summarize scene to audience and explain why the scene was important to the story or theme or character or whatever you like.
• Show them Thug Notes if you dare.

So, what I should’ve said in the interview was this: Teaching Shakespeare just to teach Shakespeare is sorta pointless and a waste of time.  But using him as a vehicle to teach students things you need to cover anyway is going to benefit both you and the students.

I welcome your comments and suggestions. I love getting new ideas.

Student Choice Creates Readers

With a nearby school district wrestling with censorship issues, I thought now would be a good time to share a recent letter from a parent.

 

Instead of blanket reading policies, educators and parents should focus on fitting an individual book to an individual reader. We cannot encourage a reluctant reader to read if the book does not appeal to him any more than you can make me like math by forcing me do a worksheet of logarithms.

Sometimes the right book is about ponies and rainbows, and sometimes that book is going to be about drug dealers and f-bombs, as was the case in the book referenced in the letter above. One book does not fit all, no matter how cool the book. So if our goal is to engage kids, we will want to encourage them to buy in. Getting them to choose the book they want to read is an excellent start.

My classroom library is stocked with books I think kids will like. Then I take it one step further and do book talks during the year. I pop a few covers on a PowerPoint and give a 15-second overview of the books. Yep. I turn into a book salesman. And kids scramble for the books when I’m finished.  Then I encourage parents to look at the books their kids choose.

Clearly, all classrooms cannot accomplish all their goals with reading anarchy where every kids reads exclusively whatever they want. There are Common Core goals, and Lexile levels, text complexity, classroom novels, thematic selections and a slew of whatever other things we have to incorporate into our plans on a daily basis.

However, if a goal is to get kids to want to read, we need to create opportunities for them to select things books which interest them.

Infographics in the Classroom

     Today was my 4th snow day this month, and I was getting a little itchy.  So I started reading an educational magazine and spotted a cool article about creating infographics to help demonstrate curriculum to our students.  This is certainly common-core appropriate, since we are supposed to give our students access to multiple mediums of content.

     But then I thought, actually, it should be the kids creating the infographics.  This would be a worthwhile formative assessment where they have to synthesize information and figure how best to show it to their peers. They might enjoy a little variety from the usual posters and PowerPoints.  Certainly History, Sociology, and Science classrooms would benefit from this.  And I would think clever ELA teachers, like myself, could think of a use as well.  So I made one about my snow days.

As you can see, I used piktochart.com.  There are many other infographic generators out there, but this is the one I selected at random.

In order to give you an idea of time required for classroom activities: it took me 45 minutes to create this.  That includes registering and skimming the options. I chose the blank template because it would take more time starting from scratch.  Also, I had no idea what information I would put on the graphic until I started playing around. Then I actually chose images and backgrounds and created the charts.  All that was 45 minutes.

Therefore, I would assume a small group who has already gathered their information could easily create one of these within one class period.  Research and presentations would take additional time.

For more quick formative assessment ideas, you can check out No Time Like Real Time.