On Read-Alouds

I'm not sure I have a blog roll on my blog anymore, especially since the blogs I follow all run through my Google Reader, but I read this post on The Reading Zone, and had to share.

One of the strategies I started using this year to get my students interested in stories is the read-aloud. I had a novel that I read aloud to the class when we'd have extra time at the end of the period. The only one we got to this year was Dreadlocks by Neal Shusterman, but I already have a list lined up for the fall, including Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sharon G. Flake's The Skin I'm In, and Richard Wright's Rite of Passage. I might pull in some more Shusterman, but I haven't decided yet. Hopefully, the book talks I'm planning to put into my weekly podcast will help me and the students decide what I should read to them--what will get them interested in reading the most.

My favorite book off of her list has to be The Giver by Lois Lowry. I recently finished the third in the series, called Messenger. Fantastic. I should have blogged about it, but I think it's one of the novels I read recently that has yet to make it up here.

One aspect of TheReadingZone's post that I particularly liked was her students' comments on their novels. She mentions that she has students read a variety of genres, authors, etc. so at least something resonates with each of her students. What I like even more was that she has them register an opinion. I want to take a page out of her book.

The List of novels (and only the novels) I'm considering for my 8th graders (they'll get to choose)

• The Giver by Lois Lowry (of course -- and I might teach this full class instead of small group)
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
  
• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
• Bad Boy: A Memoir by Walter Dean Myers
• Tangerine by Edward Bloor
• That Was Then, This Is Now by S. E. Hinton

I think there might be more on that list, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

The Skin I'm In

I wasn't sure I'd like this novel when it was recommended to me. Interestingly, I might have been the one to add it to the list of books we ordered with the grant we received last year. The Skin I'm In was the winner of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in 1998 and is on a YALSA book list.

One of the reviews in Publisher's Weekly said that the "novel will hit home." and it definitely did that. I was drawn in immediately by the dialect the first person narrator, Maleeka, used. Possibly because it's a dialect that I use when I speak with my cousins back home. And yet, the writing she does for her English class's extra project is written in a Standard American English dialect.

In my sociolinguistics class last semester, we talked about how student have a problem understanding the concept of register when speaking. Because for some, the language they use with their parents is the same as the language they use with their peers. Showing the difference between the two using a character in a novel (which I may very well read aloud) to show the difference might be beneficial.

The main thematic idea is understanding who you are and what you stand for. The new teacher, Ms. Saunders, seems more confident then she really is, Maleeka struggles within a gang-type situation, and Charlese, a main antagonist, only changes who she is in an effort to keep out of trouble.

The question I posed yesterday when I began this book, one that I will use to begin my self-identity unit in the fall, was this:

What does your face say to the world?

Then again, should we really be preoccupied with seeing ourselves through other's eyes?