At Rockridge where I teach, many of our students participate in a variety of activities - sports, music, FFA, and many other clubs. And typically at the end of the year, there are field trips and award ceremonies and college visits and, and, and.... Needless to say, planning "regular" instruction become very difficult.
Because of this, I move our novel reading unit to the end of the year and pretty much schedule the whole thing on Google Classroom. Admittedly, the unit isn't very creative. I have the books divided into sections of reading, and I have created my own questions for the text which I hope is a mixture of simple comprehension questions and deeper thinking/analysis questions. Using Google Classroom, I schedule the assignments to appear in the students' designated classrooms, and the following day I ask for students to volunteer their answers for discussion purposes. Then, I have students self-evaluate their work and place their grades into private comments of the assignment. Periodically, I check the students' work using revision history to see that students had the assignment completed before class, and if not, I drop the students' grades.
In the past I have included a Socratic Seminar, but I've only managed to squeeze one in so far, and we are scheduled to finish the novels next Monday. My guess is that I will have another seminar either after we complete the reading of the novels or after we view the movies.
This approach actually accomplishes my main goal, which is to have at least one novel analysis during the course. And because virtually everything is on Google Classroom, students can easily get the day's assignments and activities when they are absent. It seems to work, and this "unit" is a fairly quiet way to end the school year. If/when I do have a few days left, I try to incorporate a little poetry writing for a fun way to end the final days.
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