Well, we're back in the swing of things here in Orlando.  I've spent the last week doing team building and "get-to-know-you" activities, and now that the students' schedules have been corrected and adjusted, I'm ready to get us started on our books. 

I have 9th and 10th grade again this year, although unlike last year, this year three of my five classes are honors classes.  It's been fun to consider how I might do things differently with the honors class.

So, here's my plan for the beginning of the year.  I'm going to use Among the Hidden (Level 2) with the 9th graders.  It's so engaging and, while the reading level isn't incredibly challenging, there are really important concepts that we can discuss.  The one negative comment my students had last year was that I had them do too much 'stuff' while we were reading.  In retrospect, I agree with them.  There's so much to do and such good stuff in the teacher's guide, but it can be overwhelming for the students.  So, I'm going to try to focus on visualizing and vocabulary.  We'll do the "Vizualizing to find main idea" and "Visualizing reading by making connections."  We'll do one vocab word a day as a class and I'll ask students to find another word of their own to add to their notebooks.  We'll keep a word wall and develop and organization for the words we add to the wall.  We'll also use a few of the nonfiction pieces to begin practicing research skills like developing questions and noting facts.

Both of my 10th grade classes are honors classes.  We're beginning by doing The Hoopster (Level 3) as Book-in-a-Day.  This is actually an independent title, but I did this with the students last year and it went well.  Each student is responsible for a small part of the book.  They read, summarize, and note questions they have about what happened before and after their parts.  Then we go through the chapters and each person shares their information.

After The Hoopster we're going to begin Lay That Trumpet in Their Hands and then To Kill a Mockingbird.  We'll focus on tolerance and civil rights.  Then we'll move into a study of the Holocaust with Night .  Although this isn't a core novel in Level 3, we teach it to all 10th graders at our school.  There are several great nonfiction pieces in PITR that tie these two together nicely. 

That's my skeleton plan right now and I'll blog more details when we get going.

Well, I thought I'd copy Melissa's idea to let others know how the core novels went for me and my students.  I think I can say that Melissa and I probably had similar experiences.  I read Among the Hidden with my 9th grade classes (3 of them) and Slumming with my 10th grade classes (2 of them). 

I think Among the Hidden is a great way to start.  The reading itself is not challenging but there are very interesting issues for the students to contemplate and discuss.  Actually, my students hated the audio at first.  I told them to get through 5 chapters and then if they didn't like it, we'd stop listening and I could read out loud.  But after five chapters, all classes voted to continue with the audio.  Also, like Melissa's kids, we quickly got to the point when they complained when we were stopping and begged to hear more.  There were several times when I had to point out that we had less than 2 minutes left in class and that's why I wouldn't allow us to continue on to the next chapter.  The suspense/cliffhangers at the ends of the chapters make Among the Hidden an ideal book to begin with. 

After reading about Melissa's interactive word wall, I decided to try more with the vocab.  I had them start playing with concept circles.  For example, I put propaganda, rally, revolution, and crusade together and asked students to explain how those words are connected.  Then I gave the title of "change" and asked them to explain how they're related to change.   Then I had them categorize words and make their own circles.  I also gave them circles and asked them to fill in a related word.  It makes so much sense that they'd do better with the words if they're thinking about how they're related to other things and I found it much more successful that way.  I look forward to the next core novel where I can use Melissa's word wall idea and the concept circle together.

I will say that Melissa and I had one difference.  My students felt that I had them do too much while we were reading.  I think I got a little carried away with the different strategies and graphic organizers.  So, I'll need to tone that down next time I teach this.  But the book was really a success.  In fact, although I had copies of the sequels already in my classroom, I had to go buy more because the kids wanted to keep reading about Luke.

I would say that my 10th graders were less enthusiastic about Slumming.  My 2nd period class was so quiet, I often wasn't sure whether they even liked the book.  But almost every single 10th grader said it was good and that I should read it again with my classes next year.  The reading of Slumming is definitely more challenging because there are 3 different points of view and the readers have to do a lot more inferring.  Those are the things we focused on as we read.  We used the graphic organizers to keep track of what we knew about each character and what we could tell about them from their words and actions.   

This is a great novel to have students talk about how people are judged.  We had some great discussions.  The fact that there were 3 very different main characters really broadened our discussions.  For example, Alicia led us to discuss how blind girls can be sometimes when it comes to guys they're attracted to.  We looked at the inferences she made about him and the evidence she based those inferences on and the kids agreed that she made faulty inferences.  But we also agreed that all of us have done the same or know someone else who has.  I'm glad that I was able to do this novel with my 10th graders because I think we had much more mature conversations than the 9th graders would have had.  But, this might be perfect for the 9th graders after we've had a few novels under our belts, and especially after they've discussed novels in the lit circle format. 

The first novel is going well.  I'm doing this one with the 9th graders.  Friday we finished at the end of chapter 8 and the kids were literally begging me to read another chapter.  Unfortunately, we were at the end of class so that wasn't possible.  But it's always nice when we're that into the book.

We did the admit slip and possible sentences before we started and both of those were great.  We had some interesting predictions and questions before we even started reading. 

Honestly, at the beginning, when we started using the CD, I was worried.  It seemed to be going pretty slowly - some of the students didn't like the reader's voice and some thought the CD was great.  It's the usual dilemma - you can't make everyone happy.  But we're past that stage now and everyone is into the book, even students who have read it before.

I loved that the kids almost immediately made the connection to China and were asking questions about their population law.  We used the two articles in the Nonfiction Reader to do mini-research.  We started by listing their questions.  Then I asked students to choose three questions for their papers.  I read one article aloud and they listened for answers to their questions.  We talked about answers we heard, unanswered questions and new questions.  Then I gave them one of the articles to read on their own.  It went pretty well.  (Thanks, Lynette, for this idea from this summer.  Its a nice intro to research and a good first step.)

So, Monday the students will begin keeping the chapter map and the visualizing.