Book Clubs

Book Shelfie Activity to Foster a Love of Reading

Book Shelfie Activity to Foster a Love of Reading

In today's fast-paced digital age, where screens have become a ubiquitous presence, fostering a love for reading among high school students might seem like a daunting task. As educators, it's our responsibility to ignite the spark of literary passion within them.

High-interest Books for Reluctant Readers in Secondary ELA

High-interest Books for Reluctant Readers in Secondary ELA

Should we are should we not teach the classics? I can see both sides to the argument, but with my students that struggle, I defer to the side of practicality and place more importance on getting students to read anything… something… rather than… doing nothing.

That gets us to the point of this post: a list of high-interest books for middle school and high school ELA. These books are sure to get reluctant students to read!

Adding Diversity to British Literature: Text Lists by Theme

Adding Diversity to British Literature: Text Lists by Theme

The Canon of British Literature, as we know, consists of a homogenous group that does not reflect the rich multicultural world of Great Britain today. As a result, any survey of British Literature oftentimes becomes a skewed representation of the literary diaspora of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Five Ways to Infuse Humor into Your ELA Curriculum

Five Ways to Infuse Humor into Your ELA Curriculum

Let’s face it, most great works of literature are heavy, and those are the ones we typically teach. Why is that? Probably because the moments of great pain and agony in life are the ones that have the most profound impact us. Ergo, we teach Hamlet or Macbeth over The Comedy of Errors. Or, we teach heart-wrenching memoirs such as A Long Walk to Water over Bossypants. I find that my students sometime ask me why all great literature is so dark and why we have to talk about death, violence, tragedy, and depression so often when there’s so much of that in the world already.

Texts to Diversify Your Secondary Curriculum

Texts to Diversify Your Secondary Curriculum

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that we as secondary English teachers work consciously to diversify the cannon. “Imagine a world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book.” This is the mission of the organization We Need Diverse Books. We Need Diverse Books has been working towards this goal for a long time, and they provide amazing resources to help teachers do just that.

The Junk Journal Novel Project for Secondary ELA

The Junk Journal Novel Project for Secondary ELA

While junk journals can vary from person to person, they generally share one primary characteristic: the journal is made with mostly a mix of found and recycled materials.

5 Ways to Use Jamboard in Secondary ELA

5 Ways to Use Jamboard in Secondary ELA

Jamboard through Google has become a cornerstone tool in my virtual ELA classes because one of my go-to strategies when we had students in class was to use sticky notes on the board. You can read more about the Board but NOT BORING: My Go-to Collaborative Activity for Secondary ELA strategy here.

How to Avoid the Summer Slide with Summer Reading Challenges & One-Pager Projects

How to Avoid the Summer Slide with Summer Reading Challenges & One-Pager Projects

Summer has that way of magically erasing knowledge, so one way to prevent some of that summer slide is to engage students in summer reading through a summer reading challenge and also through one-pagers to help students interact, process, and analyze what they’re reading.

Ideas for Pairing Classic Lit with Modern Lit

Ideas for Pairing Classic Lit with Modern Lit

Connecting classic pieces of literature with high-interest modern texts is a great strategy to engage students in the classics while maintaining their interest. Not only that, but intertextuality (making connections between texts) allows students to extend their analysis into a compare/ contrast format that enables them to analyze literary elements and techniques on a deeper level.

TEN Children's Books for Secondary ELA

TEN Children's Books for Secondary ELA

Children’s books can be deceivingly “easy” and “childish.” But upon closer observation, many children’s books contain enough complexity to make them relevant texts to use as teaching tools for literary elements, techniques, and analysis.

5 Innovative Activities & Projects for Any Novel Unit

5 Innovative Activities & Projects for Any Novel Unit

As secondary ELA teachers, there are certain traditional activities that we tend to give our students during a novel study. These activities range from body maps to dialectical journals.

The Logline: A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction

The Logline:  A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction

In screenwriting (writing for movies and TV), the logline is key to brainstorming story ideas and also selling them or "pitching" them to buyers.  Crafting loglines can help the writer to flesh out new plot ideas before writing the entire script.  It's much easier to revise the logline rather than an entire hundred page script!  

LiveBinders in the Classroom

LiveBinders in the Classroom

LiveBinders.com is a website that enables the user to create virtual three-ring binders of digital files including, but not limited to, YouTube videos, Google docs, DropBox files, images, websites, text files, and much more!

Setting up & Assessing Book Club in Secondary ELA: FOUR FREE GUIDES FOR SUCCESS!

Setting up & Assessing Book Club in Secondary ELA:  FOUR FREE GUIDES FOR SUCCESS!

Book club is now considered to be one of the “best practices” in English Language Arts.  Book clubs differ from traditional literary circles in that they are less teacher-directed.  The students take on the responsibility of selecting their roles, making their assignments, keeping track of their reading, and much more. 

Secondary ELA Book Club: A Menu of Options

Secondary ELA Book Club:  A Menu of Options

The first rule of Book Club is:  you do not talk about Book Club.  The second rule of Book Club is:  you DO NOT talk about Book Club!  Kidding.  The only rule of Book Club is: DO IT...