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.