In my experience, the biggest value of novels is not in the reading of the novel itself but in the awesome spinouts possible at any given unplanned moment. Today I was working with the chapter in Brandon Brown (Quebec) where he didn’t want to get up. His mom walks into the room and says, “Brandon and Katie! It’s time to get up!”
So I just started asking questions of the kids:
“Does your mom wake you up?”
“Should a parent wake up a kid?”
“Should a kid wake up a parent?”
“Should an alarm clock wake up a kid?”
All of a sudden instead of a boring translation of a book (we didn’t create it so we didn’t have ownership of it like we do with stories) we were Jumping into the Space! (part of Reading Option A). They were outputting a lot of French. Why? Because it was a fun topic for them. (They were all so cute in defending the position that a parent MUST wake up a child.)
I quickly figured out that my NON PRE-PLANNED structures (structures don’t have to be planned) that fell into my lap in that moment of class were “should” and “alarm clock”. (I did not need get reps on “to wake up” because last week I got about 25 or 30 minutes of reps on that verb. It is one of the verbs that lend itself to easy questioning – “What time do you wake up?” etc.)
So if we think that novels are boring, because they are, we can bring them to life.
Caution: you’ve got to be able to let your freak flag fly a little when doing this. If you are like so many of the robotic teachers out there poisoning our kids concealed hope that one day they will be fluent in another language, you may think that a class discussing a novel would be all about questions like this:
“Does Brandon’s mother or father wake him up?” (WHO CARES?)
Loosen up! Think of questions outside the box. Get your kids involved. It is the personalized questions that make this work fun. Live a little. Go outside the box! The weather’s fine!