After reading The Outsiders, KoKo just knocked of The Giver.
For their final assignment for The Outsiders, KoKo and a classmate created a scrapbook for the novel. It is quite good. They went so far as to actually burn the edges of a letter that was retrieved from the fire in the church. That is meaningful work.
Last night - even though she wasn't supposed to read ahead, which makes zero sense to me - she finished The Giver.
When asked if she read ahead, KoKo wisely lied and said no. She would have lost all of her points had she told the truth.
This seems backwards to me.
Why punish kids for reading?
I pray kids will read ahead in my class.
Sometimes as teachers we can take something special and magical like a kid's connection with a book and reduce it to a series of true and false quizzes or reading check guides. Ugghhhh.
Now, don't get me wrong, I struggle with the quizzes and reading guides as much as the next teacher.
But to punish someone for reading ahead?
Idiocy!
I was reminded of how foolish I was being about this earlier in the quarter when I assigned the first couple chapters of TKM. Before a student left after class, she asked if she could get several worksheets for the upcoming chapters.
"I don't read a novel just two chapters at a time. I kind of get into it and read the whole thing," she confessed.
Now what could I say to that?
How about, bravo! Thanks for teaching me a lesson.
That's when I chucked the majority of my reading schedule and just let the kids read at their own pace. I still had quizzes, guides, and creative assignments. I just had them complete the work mostly at their own pace.
Now I know some read the book in two days and some have not yet read it - and we've been done with it a week now.
Such is life.
But bravo for those who read a classroom novel as if it's a real live novel that they'd read on their own for enjoyment. We don't take many quizzes on those do we? Sure, we might not study the novels we read at home, but don't tell me we don't dive into them and enjoy them. Maybe that's better than studying? Maybe it's really the same thing?
I don't know but when a kid can stay up to close to midnight, as KoKo did last night, to devour the final few chapters of a novel . . . well, that's pretty damn special in my book - no pun intended.
2 comments:
Yes, yes, yes! I don't advocate lying to a teacher, but yes, she was wise to say she didn't read ahead. Punish the kid with a zero? I always read ahead and the only thing I jeapordized was missing a question on a chapter quiz because I forgot some minute detail.
You could have blown me over with a feather when she said she stayed up until midnight to finish the book. We talked about the ending and why we came to the conclusions we did. (Which I know you don't agree with...you pessimist!!) We talked about the release and how horrible it was. We talked about Jonas' father. We even laughed about the "stirrings."
I've waited 14 years to have these types of conversations!
We'll have to give her teacher a little credit, though. At least they're not doing grammar worksheets anymore.
I thought I did give the teacher some credit. What he did with KoKo's "The Night Before Christmas" poem was brilliant and perfectly modeled the full writing process. And KoKo's "Outsiders" scrapbook was great. It's just seems odd to punish a reader for, well, reading ahead.
Hey, I'm not a pessimist. Jonas didn't make it at the end. That's life. But now with the 'companion' books I guess he did make it and is referred to as 'the boy who came over the hill.'
So maybe my take is all wrong. But then why did Lowry make her original conclusion so ambiguous?
The good news is that KoKo's eyes lit up when I told her that there were two books that followed "The Giver." I believe she is already reading the next one!
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