My Sunday Night Lightbulb: Whole Novels!

So it is Sunday night and I am sitting on the couch barely able to focus on school stuff thinking about how I am going to get through the next 2 weeks until winter break. I am looking at my Google Doc that I use for planning my whole school year, trying to decide what we are going to do next. To Kill a Mockingbird is our next novel and it is SO. DANG. LONG! I usually have to take a full quarter to teach this novel and I feel like we ALL get bored with it by then. Finally, I put everything to the side and had dinner.

Somewhere between burning my tongue on my soup and slurping up the last bite, I had a lightbulb moment. There is this book that I bought a few years ago. I started it, but never got a chance to finish it, but the ideas were very compelling. Whole Novels for the Whole Class has a very basic concept that students should read a novel in its entirety before dissecting it. This would be perfect for this novel and my conundrum of time.

Then I thought back to that book sitting on my bookshelf. There is no way I can read that thing before I start teaching this novel in a week. So, I did what anyone would do. I took to Google! And in my search, I found this amazing article by Ariel Sacks all about incorporating Whole Novels in her own classroom.

And so, in just a week, I am going to start in on this Whole Novels journey. We shall see how this goes!

Be good!

Mama Eggs