There was recently an article in the Atlantic about elite college students who had gone their entire school career without being assigned an entire book to read. They had read excerpts, they had read articles and sections of books, but had never been assigned an entire book to read as part of their classes.
The article goes on to discuss the fact that this has been a growing trend and that the testing mania and the accountability focus has led teachers to streamline their curriculum to better match these high stakes testing situations. Students spend the majority of their classes reading shorter excerpts and answering questions about the text, in order to mimic the tests they will be required to take at the end of the year.
Add to that the fact that states and districts have begun mandating instructional minutes and what can be taught when, and teachers have no time or flexibility to spend on a deep dive into a whole piece of literature.
As an elementary school teacher who has been in the classroom for 30+ years, I cannot disagree. But most teacher agree that using literature in the classroom is critical. Most of us have found creative ways to do that.
One of my favorites is “Book In A Day”.
For this activity, I copy the pages of the book we are doing, being sure to white-out any chapter or page numbers. Students are put into groups, and each team reads one chapter of the book. They do not know if they have been given the first chapter, the last, or one from somewhere in the middle of the book. After reading the chapter, the students summarize the chapter on a large piece of chart paper. They use words, pictures, and anything that helps them to let everyone else know what their chapter was about.
After everyone has shared their chart paper with the class, the students try to put them in the proper order.
This activity always results in engaged students, laughter, disagreements, and some really interesting discussions. Some of the skills students must use to complete this are:
- Students need to understand the arc of a story and will have to be able to identify information presented through that prism. Does this feel like the author is laying the groundwork? Or beginning to wrap things up? Does this feel like things are coming to a climax?
- Students need to pay attention to place, time, order, and other words and phrases that may help us piece together the events of the story.
- Students need to understand character development and how authors help to unveil characters, their motives and backstories, to us. Then they must think deeply about what they are reading in their chapter and make some inferences.
- Students need to think deeply and critically as both a reader and a writer, as they try to put the chapters in order. At this point they also are looking more deeply at the writing and looking for clues.
This becomes a fun ELA activity in which we can then have some really interesting discussions about what the writer did and why. Why did the author choose to include specific information in a specific chapter? How would the story be different if things were reordered?
Another benefit of this activity is that every single time I do it, I have students who want to read the entire book when we are done. They snap up any copies I have on my classroom shelves and others rush to the library to find a copy of the book.
Because students are only reading one chapter, and doing it with a partner, even my struggling readers can be actively involved and engaged. Additionally, because they have read one chapter already, and have seen the summary and plot (through our ordering of the chapters) they have a scaffolding on which to build if they read the entire book themselves at this point. And many do!
Yes, there are many obstacles to using literature in classrooms, but there are also lots of creative (and sneaky) ways to do it anyway. 😊
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