Celebrating Literacy and Running a Read-Aloud Marathon
However simple or complex you make your Harry Potter Day, it can be educational as well as fun. With some creative curriculum planning, teachers can develop many activities to showcase particular literacy skills. For example, a sketch table enables students to create an archetypal “family tree” that starts with the Harry Potter novels but moves to other literature students have read. For example, students might choose to create an archetypal family tree for Mrs. Weasley that shows Womens Shoes how her character comes from a long line of literary caregivers; or, students might draw a tree showing how Ron Weasley exemplifies the literary importance of the hero’s best friend.
Take plenty of pictures of student activities and their projects to use for examples and inspiration in future years. Also, save the best banners, trivia questions, student drawings, and extra art supplies so that next time you’ll have a head start. Maybe as the excitement of the books fades, enthusiasm will wane, but ever since my first Harry Potter day, future students have been stopping by to make sure that I’m still planning “that fun day.” And surely there are other books that can inspire literacy celebrations like the ones I’ve hosted with Harry and his friends.
Literacy celebrations can be thrown for any texts students are excited about. Additionally, celebrations can easily be adapted for a specific type of literacy (e.g., each student chooses an example of a trope or scheme from a different book to introduce to the class at a “Tropes and Schemes Celebration,”1 or students can give a talk on their favorite nonfiction book at a “Nonfiction Genre Celebration”). Once you’ve thrown your first literacy celebration, you and your students will find dozens of ways to adapt these ideas to celebrate multiple literacies,
In my first graduate class, Child Development, the Italian-German professor taught me that “Play is children’s work.” Luciana was an expert on Piaget, and that simple, straightforward, stunning formulation she drew from his work has stayed with me for the past 25 years of teaching. Yet this principle proved difficult to enact as I left behind middle school classrooms and began to teach older students, especially those New York City adolescents from middle-class families, who became more conscious of tests and the compulsions to achieve. I taught so many high school seniors who held dim memories of those times when “reading used to be fun.” The work of reading was perhaps epitomized in the summer reading assignment, which I dutifully handed out to high school students every June, when they most needed to Running Shoes see beaches, mountains, forests. But I wanted to challenge these kids in at least one extra way—to get them to enjoy a novel that questioned not only middle-class aspirations but also interrogated basic US values. I assigned Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for summer reading.
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