How often does a high school teacher hear his or her students ask for their books? Hearing this question from a few eager students this week gives me the energy to keep going…
The students are asking for their thematic personal novel choices I started talking about last week to go along with Macbeth. The problem is I came up with the idea and then had to wait for the books to come back from the local Area Education Agency (AEA). I can’t keep a secret, and I wanted the kids to have choices, so I presented the novels, they picked their top three, and then we sat and waited for them to arrive. The books came, today, at the end of the day and I was able to give one to a student who stopped by my room at the end of the day to ask again, “Are the books here?” his personal reading choice.
We’re trying to think about the best way to teach kids in the 21st Century world, and that means incorporating a variety of texts into our curriculum, exposing them to multicultural and contemporary pieces. Instead of reading Macbeth, we’re reading the themes presented in the famous Shakespeare tragedy and reading more than the play in outside literature circles.
Although the choices are probably endless, I quickly found a few texts that would work and engage students in the theme & motifs we’re studying with the traditional curricular content of Macbeth. We’re reading the play in school and the outside texts will be read outside of school. Students are keeping a reading log, focusing on a motif that appears in the play and possible in their outside novel, and considering the themes and how the characters in the play and novels demonstrate them.
If you’d like to more about this thematic study, just ask! It is still a work in progress, I must admit. I’ll let you know how it goes after we’re done…
