I have been getting ideas from this book:
Burgess has pages of what he calls 'presentation hooks' which encourage you to think more carefully and creatively about how to capture students' attention and keep them engaged.
Here is what I have done for the first four weeks:
Week 1 - Talk about genre, hand out readers' notebooks, explain how challenges work (three weeks to read three books in one genre and earn a genre sticker).
Week 2 - Play Star Wars theme song and ask to guess first genre. Book talk a few Sci-Fi books and discuss what books students have already read in this genre. Review how the readers' notebooks are working. Discuss books read.
Week 3 - Discuss books read. Show a YouTube playlist of Sci-Fi book trailers.
Week 4 - Discuss books read. Talk about abandoning books if they don't capture interest. Give out first genre stickers. Take suggestions for the new genre in Week 5. Have students take an online quiz to find out which Star Wars character they would be (disturbingly we seem to have quite a few Darth Vaders, I was Yoda).
I have lots of ideas for presentation hooks for each of the genres we will be covering. These hooks help me keep our meetings fresh and interesting and are a fun way to finish up after we have talked about what we are reading. I'm also looking forward to the end of term when we will eat Ninjabread Men Cookies!
