Chapter Chat - Make Literacy Engaging

At the end of last year, the chapter chat team announced that they would not be continuing Chapter Chat for years 7 & 8. This gutted me as I really enjoyed it, and saw the benefit my students had in it. This made me make the decision that I would try to continue to offer it. I contacted the people who were in charge of CC to offer my services. Unfortunately they choose not to take up my offer. I was gutted by this decision, but then decided with the help of a principal friend, that I would just run it anyways.  I choose a book over the holidays, read it, and set up a google site for it. https://sites.google.com/longford.school.nz/chapterchat2019/home. I have four other teachers decide to do it for their classes. Two of these teachers are from other schools. It took several hours to set up. Not only did I set up the google site, but also two twitter pages. One for year 7 & 8 Chapter chat, the other for my class.

I have used the same formate as what the chapter chat team were using, 10 literacy based activities that students can complete, and on the Friday 10 questions about the chapters.

The first week we did it, I got my class to complete as much work as they thought they needed. Some managed to complete all activities, some hardly any. I talked to the class about this, some said they actually needed more guidance about how much they should be doing and all stated they enjoyed the freedom to choose their activities. This lead me to changing it up by giving each activity a number based on how hard it is, and then telling my students what number they needed to achieve by the end of the week. This has resulted in all my students being more focussed during literacy time. However, I do have a couple of students who are not pushing themselves.

Overall my students seem engaged the are enjoying the book (Out of my Mind by Sharon Draper) and are invested in what is happening next.

The following pictures are students sharing their work and commenting on others using Twitter Twitter page