Marcia Wright, Teacher

In my classes, reading a good book is what we love to do. At least
once each week, I plan time for my students to read a "Wright book" for
at least 30 minutes in class. For Honors, students must choose two
books per semester, one each 9 weeks, from a list of 150 Great Books
which I keep at my desk. These books are available in either our library or at the county library. After reading those "classics," my students
learn how to write a brief, two-page analysis for their assessment. Any
additional books beyond the required two can be chosen by my students,
as long as the book is fiction and at least 100 pages long. In regular
9th grade, the students can choose any book from home or from the
library, with the same stipulations; while I encourage the 150 Greats, I don't insist on that.

Many times I have watched a student become involved in a book which is part of a series, such as Harry Potter, the Tolkien trilogy (or back to include The Hobbit), L.A. Meyer's Bloody Jack
adventures (I'm about to finish the last of the set, and will truly
miss this rowdy girl, until the next one is published later this year),
or The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, part of the Disc World
he has created. Their enthusiastic written responses have inspired me
to also read these books, and I love to discuss their excellent choices with them.

This coming year the 9th grade teachers
want to establish Book Clubs. In the middle school setting, they are
called "literacy circles," so if you want more information, you'll have
to use that search term. But for our purposes, "book club" rolls off
the tongue more freely. We have been in consultation with our media specialist, Mrs. Rasco, for several weeks about which books to feature,
and we've decided on 12 between us, of which we have multiple copies in
the library. Five of these featured books are read by Honors 9 over the summer, and we have added many more, some classics and some recently published. We hope to have the students in flexible groups according
to which book they choose to read and discuss amongst themselves, with
us teachers checking on their progress and maybe giving them a few
short writing assignments to be sure that reading is really happening.
We want to leave enough space in the plan for the students to tell us
what they would like their book club to look like: some choices might
include a Power Point presentation when the book is finished, a collage
of major events in the book, or a comparison paper involving another
book. The possibilities are infinite, and as varied as our students
will be.

In addition to the ones I've already mentioned, here are a few more books that look good to me; although I haven't read all of them, you might like to try a couple this summer, and you can find them at your library, or at scholastic.com. Scroll on down to see the list; I can't get it to move any higher.