For the past few years I have held a reading club for my students. I do have a criteria I look at when I ask students to join my group. I try not to base it solely off their reading level, but also look at their maturity and how drawn they are to reading in general. I would love to invite ALL my students, but at the same time, I want to keep it small so we can really dig in and have a good discussion.
The past two years I have read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. This year we are reading The Giver by Lois Lowry and my students are loving it.
I began searching for activities we could do with this book and I came across a resource by Scholastic here. It gave a lot of great information such as background information on Lois Lowry as well as questions she has been asked and then lots of great activities that allow students to really connect with the book. One of the activities was to create a journal of memories that line up with different emotions/feelings. Then then students share an emotion and memory and discuss what it would be like to lose that memory…would it be worth giving it up due to the pain even if that meant you have to give up the good part of the memory too? I thought this was brilliant!
Since we only get an hour once a week after school, we started making our journals early on, even having a working lunch one day to finish them up. We are about to begin writing in our journals (our awesome “junk” journals) and I can’t wait to see what my students write down. We have had so many “ah-ha” moments already and I know this will be one of them!
thenovellibrarian.com 