Awesome Assignment Idea

Teaching the patterns of the Joseph Campbell monomyth/quest wheel, archetypes, literary devices, symbolism, etc as a series of patterns which can then be applied to a series of blog-based assignments geared to any book that a student chooses to read.

So, get those open-choice novel projects brewing, especially considering the challenges with buying class sets of novels.

Potentially Interesting C-level Assignment Idea

Have students respond to what they've read in their class reading time by "translating" one or two selections of what they've read into into some other form.

Example: a student who reads To Kill A Mockingbird may choose to turn the book into a board game that puts into effect the situations of the plot as experienced by Jem and Scout.

A Shortcut To Know About Differentiated Instruction

ETFO bookclub talked about this book on DI that you may want to scan by reading this PDF.

What Should Students Read?

This PDF is something that we may wish to check out.

It is about the books that we choose for our students to read, why we should think about these choices, and so on.

And this next one is an article with some more specific book recommendations (US-based, I'm afraid).

Discourse Communities

Something that came up as a board interest at a meeting on May 27, 2010 was this term "discourse community."

You might want to check into this, perhaps starting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_community