Week 4 Questions/Assignment

1. I believe that you are to read Ch. 4 - Realistic Fiction. This is one of my favorite genres. I'd be interested to know how many of the best YAL of all time books you have already read (p. 103). Would you agree with their list? Adolescents are struggling with the issues brought up in realistic fiction: perfection in an imperfect world, sexuality, making and maintaining friends, adolescent cruelty, family problems, and mid, body , and spirit. Remember those days?Why not try some of the reader response questions (p.150) with your students this week?

Out of the 22 books on that list, sadly, I have only read seven of them. I agree with a lot of the books that are on that list, but it makes me see how out of date I am to the literature that has come out in the last 6 years. Most of the books that are discussed have been out since 2000 or earlier and I've spent over half the time since then in college reading what was assigned to me and not so much for myself.

I know while I was in middle school and high school and when I could in college, I read the books The Giver, The Outsiders, Holes, Out of the Dust, The Catcher in the Rye, I am the Cheese, Stargirl, Julie of the Wolves, Shiloh series, Armegeddon Summer, and many others that had to do with the struggles adolescents go through. I was a little disappointed not to see some of the books from the 90s that had come out and also books from Great Britain. There are some authors and books that I think would be great choices for teens too.

I loved some of the activities they discuss at the end of the chapter. Some of them I have used, but this books had some I haven't seen before and will be most useful. I will definitely take the books suggestion and print off the copy of the reader-response questions to have near by when discussing reading with my students. I didn't have the opportunity to use them while substituting, but when I have had my own class, I'm always trying to figure out how to start a class discussion.

2. I would also like you to find a picture book for YA's and talk on your post as to why you chose this particular book.

The first book that came to my mind was Maus: A Survivors Tale by Art Spiegelman. It is a biography about his father's experiences during the holocaust. It is more like a comic book, but it has a lot of symbolism in the animals the characters are and it really makes you picture the horror of what happened during the Holocaust. It is a series I have looked into buying for myself to use in the classroom because some students connect more with these than with the novels that are assigned. The pictures also fit well with the dialogue in the books and for students that have a difficult time picturing in their minds what they are reading, this is a great book to use to help them develop this skill. Overall, I love this series, and it was a different approach to learning about an event where many horrible things happened.

Since I am not sure if this is what Sue meant for the assignment, I did look into picture books for young adults. One that stood out is The House that Crack Built by Clark Taylor. It takes a nursery rhyme with a hip-hop beat and uses it to discuss drug abuse beginning with its cultivation in S.America. I think students would be able to relate to this more than with Maus since it applies to them now and brings in elements they find interesting, such as music. It can also be used to talk about different themes in readings and help readers open up with each other and have discussions.