LANGUAGE ARTS
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Overview | What does it mean to be literate? How do our reading experiences shape who we are? In this lesson, students reflect on a formative reading experience and use it as a springboard for tracing their reading lives by creating timelines to reflect past and present experiences. They culminate the personal reading history project through reading, writing and/or discussion.
Materials | Student journals, handouts
Warm-up | Tell students you are going to lead them through a guided meditation designed to help them recreate an important reading experience in their memory.
Begin by asking them to close their eyes and put their heads down on their desks. Turn the lights down or off. Read this script, giving them a few moments to reflect after each prompt:
Today, we’re going to take a trip back through your life as a reader. In your mind, put aside the reading you’re doing for school and go to a place where you have positive feelings about reading…
Maybe you are being read to or maybe you are reading yourself …
Try to settle on a single memory … and dwell in it.
What book is being read? What does it look like? Feel like? Are the pages thick or thin? Are there pictures? What colors and images stand out? What does it smell like? Where did this book come from? How did you happen upon it? Did someone give it to you? Did you borrow it from the library? If you chose it, what attracted you to it?
