http://www.listchallenges.com/english-student-book-challenge
When I was looking around for different books to include in a lesson plan for one of my classes I came across this website called list challenges.com. On the website it has all different types of challenges to complete, such as watch the top 10 highest rated movies, or in this case, it features a list of the top books that all English students should read by the time they complete high school. It lists 142 books that the author of the list believed that every student should read.
What I’m curious about is how can I incorporate this into my classroom? How can I also make it about writing? I love the idea of students reading controversial books and books that are considered classics that we would not be allowed to, or have time to cover in class. But if they do it on their own time I would like to be able to bring it back to my lessons. Maybe I could offer incentives for the students who read a certain amount of books on the list. Or in the beginning of the year we can create our own list to have the students choose from and offer different types of rewards for completing the books.
In order to bring writing into this, I would probably offer different incentives for students to read and write. I would not grade anything they wrote because I would want them to just react to these different books they were reading from the list. I really love the idea of the students having a journal where they could just write their feelings about the book and the characters but not for a grade. If they chose to turn in the journal or allow me to read it I could offer a homework pass or maybe a redo on a quiz they did not do so well on. This would allow them to motivate them to start the writing but then would hopefully turn into them really enjoying the reaction writing that they were doing.