The seventh grade English curriculum at my school includes a lot of historical novels, and when I teach seventh grade English, I talk about how historical fiction falls somewhere along a spectrum that ranges from almost fully rooted in historical fact to almost fully fictional. One book that falls on the mostly-rooted-in-fact end is Melanie… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Read Aloud
Read Alouds: Fall 2015
This past week, a service day and some standardized test taking interrupted our regular school schedule, so I didn’t get to teach my normal classes for a couple of days. When the schedule got back to normal, I wasn’t at all surprised by the question that many of my students asked: “Are we doing read… Read more »
Relating to a book vs. liking it: A(nother) case against “girl books” and “boy books”
At the end of lunch a couple of weeks ago, a group of seventh grade students called me over to their table to tell me that they’d been talking about our read-aloud novel, Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead, which will come out this August, and they had a suggestion. On double period days, we should… Read more »
Read-Aloud Recommendations, the Fall ’14 Edition
This past August, like most Augusts, my to-read pile was dominated by a certain kind of book: I was mostly reading new books that I thought might work well as middle school read alouds. I’ve blogged before about why I love to read aloud to middle schoolers and the criteria I use when selecting a good read… Read more »
Reading Aloud in a Middle School English Classroom
The other day, I read Joe McGee’s powerful blog post about being the kind of hero who doesn’t need a cape: the kind of understated hero who reads books aloud to kids. I recommend reading the post in its entirety, but in one part of it, Joe describes reading to one of his three sons: “I sit… Read more »