Choices

Our school used the Edge textbook program, which is published by Hampton-Brown.  Each unit is organized around a theme, such as loyalty.  Each unit includes three trade books, each at a distinct difficulty level.  I believe that motivation is such an important component to reading that I feel the need to provide my students with a choice, rather than requiring students to read a book based solely on the lexile level.  I believe that students will gain more from reading a book that is somewhat “easy” than they would by pretending to read a more challenging book that does not appeal to their interests.  On the other hand, a student might be capable of reading a more challenging book than would be expected if the motivation is there to try.  Restricting students’ choices based solely on a lexile ranking is one of the most frequent complaints I have heard from students, teachers, and parents about the AR program. 

I encourage student choice by introducing each book with a youtube video trailer and asking students to jot down notes about each book as they view the trailers.  Then I ask them to rank the books in order of preference.  I review their choices, and try to allow each student to read his or her first choice book.  If I notice that a student has selected a book as a first choice that I think could be too difficult, I explain this to him or her.  Then I will show the book and ask him or her to “take 5” – read about 5 fingers length of text aloud and count how many errors are made.  If a student makes more than 5 errors in that length of text, the book is probably too difficult.  At that point I would strongly encourage the student to make another choice. 

The books my students had to choose from most recently were Two Badges by Mona Ruiz, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Wave by Todd Strasser.  Below are two of the trailers I used to introduce these books.