NCTE INBOX

August 2, 2005
...ideas
Free access to journal articles and book excerpts mentioned in this Inbox is provided for 21 days. After this free access period expires, articles are available to journal subscribers only.


Connecting to Summer Reading This Fall Last spring, you encouraged students to read over the summer. What do you do now that they're returning to the classroom? Whether your school had a formal summer reading program or students read self-selected texts, you can offer activities that invite discussion and strengthen reading skills. These resources offer specific classroom activities that can connect with students' summer reading. Younger students are likely to have read picture books and short chapter books the featured or included animals. Invite them to share details on the animals and use their memories from their summer reading to inspire an inquiry project with the ReadWriteThink lesson Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts (E). Take a trip to the library and ask students to find copies of books that they read over the summer. Once the texts are collected, use the ReadWriteThink lesson Book Sorting: Using Observation and Comprehension to Categorize Books (E) to encourage students to look at their summer readings more closely. Book reports are one of the more frequent ways students are asked to share details about their summer reading. Bring book reports to life in your classroom with one of the following book report alternatives: Examining Story Elements Using Story Map Comic Strips (E) Writing Resumes for Characters in Historical Fiction (E) Comic Strips and Cartoon Squares (M) Character and Author Business Cards (M) Book Reviews, Annotation, and Web Technology (M) "Fifty Alternatives to the Book Report" (M-S-C), from English Journal Modify the purpose of the ReadWriteThink lesson Authentic Persuasive Writing to Promote Summer Reading (S) slightly, and ask students to create pamphlets that encourage others to read some of the same books they did. Ask students to each choose one book from their summer reading and create a literary scrapbook for the characters or the author, using the ReadWriteThink lesson Literary Scrapbooks Online: An Electronic Reader-Response Project (S). The lesson's examples focus on Mark Twain, but the technique can be used with any text or author. College students coming to the classroom may not have been asked to participate in any active reading program between terms, but they still will have read. It's quite possible that most of their reading was in online forums, blogs, and instant messages, but they were reading. Begin your discussions by asking students to talk about the reading that they do for work or pleasure outside of their classes. Be sure to encourage students to use a wide definition of the word text by asking them to think beyond books, newspapers, and magazines to the many other kinds of texts they interact with. Reader response techniques can provide structures that inspire college students to talk about their readings in more details. The following articles, both from Teaching English in the Two-Year College, suggest procedures, icebreakers, journal prompts, and collaborative writing activities: "Liberating Students through Reader-Response Pedagogy in the Introductory Literature Course" (C) "In Praise of Reader-Response: Validating Student Voices in the Literature Classroom" (C) For additional resources to support your reading program, review the ideas included in the Summer Reading and Learning Teaching Resource Collection (G). NOTE: Free access to journal articles mentioned in this Inbox is provided for 21 days. After this free access period expires, articles are available to journal subscribers only. This Inbox Idea was published 08-02-2005. Initials in annotations indicate academic level of the resource (E=Elementary, M=Middle, S=Secondary, C=College, G=General).