[Kaelyn] http://home.cogeco.ca/~rayser3/

Hello everyone, here are 3 great ideas for teaching literature from Outta Ray's Head (http://home.cogeco.ca/~rayser3/):
  
1. Find 3 songs that relate to the novel.  Play the songs in class, and hand out the lyrics to the students.  Ask the students to annotate the lyrics and have a class discussion about the connection between the songs and novel.  
  
2. Write several diary entries from the perspective of one of the major characters.
  
3. The students form groups to work on newsletter projects.  As this is a long-term project, students will be given a checklist which will help them to organize and keep track of the things that need to be completed.  This project will be scaffolded by having students keep a writing process record, do pre-writing, and hand up draft(s) of the newsletter.  This project requires students to come up with a newsletter title which must be relevant to the book, advertisement(s) related to people, places, and/or things in the book, news stories about events in the book, one or more obituaries about characters in the book.  With a variety of articles to write, students will be able to work on the areas that they are more interested in.  Students are to turn in a short writing reflection sheet for the entire newsletter at the end of the project as well.  They have to explain which part of the newsletter is their favorite and why, and also explain the worst or hardest part about writing a newsletter and why. I think a variation of this idea would be to have the whole class involved in one newsletter project. However, this might result in a strict division of roles and some students might end up working only on the technical aspects of a newsletter.