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This year our school established a committee to look at our reading incentive program and determine how we could encourage our students to read because they “want” to read. Of major concern, is the fact that aliteracy becomes an epidemic in the middle school years. How can we keep our readers reading? We all realized that today’s students are totally focused on any thing deemed “entertaining” and socially engaging. It seems our best hope at “engaging the reading attitudes” of our students would be to change some of old incentives and create more enriching activities that incorporated the things they do best, social networking and technology. Thus our committee established a reading program that encouraged our students to talk about books F2F, via videoconferencing, chat rooms or blogs. We offered them opportunities to explore the use of camcorders and online production tools such as PhotoStory, Audacity or GCast to share books they had read. We even provided for the artistic bunch, a scrapbooking center. There are no requirements about the book selection – total student choice. There are no required “projects” for sharing, simply sharing the books you’ve read, however, you wish.
As we are progressing through this year, we have hit some walls. Not enough time at school with access to computers, establishing that this is not “for a grade” both for teachers and students, and enough volunteers to handle the number of F2F book clubs that we’d like to offer. We have tried to stress that with assigned readings of novels, students are rewarded with a grade – our reading program allows us to reward students that are reading because they choose to, not because they have to! Check out this video created by a committee member to use as an introduction to our reading program.
