Novel Studies

This week, my reading class began reading a novel instead of reading stories out of the textbook. It's an interesting little experiment for me. Among other things, it's amazing to see how excited they get when I tell them we are getting into our groups for the novels. It's a whole new experience for some of them. And it's really clear that this is a kind of teaching that works. They are motivated. They are excited and they ask me when they come in if we get to read today. I'm still having a little trouble getting them talking about the book, but I would definitely say that they enjoy this much more than when we were just reading from the textbook.