It may still be 15C out in the middle of August here in Vancouver (we’ve had what amounts to five days of truly hot weather this season), but the kids are out of school, the pool is open, and we are in full summer mode for a few more weeks.
That also means that my creative writing classes were PACKED (and I mean packed) with young authors who knew they need to keep reading and writing during the long break but also didn’t really want comma worksheets and book summaries.
My secret plan to keep them going was to bribe them with pizza. They received long reading lists and daily writing tasks at the beginning of the term. The pizza at the end of the Summer Reading Challenge Rainbow proved the key to getting them to read more than 100 novels this summer.
The way we kept track of it all was a bit sentimental, a bit creative, and a bit old-school community building.
We made a Summer Reading Story Quilt.
Over the course of eight weeks, the kids got to make a quilt square every time the read a new book. Around the edges, they had to come up with symbols that stood for the theme, the characters, or a literary device used in the novel. Then, in the middle, they drew their favourite scene and captioned it.
Admittedly, there was a wide range of engagement, but they had fun using their brains in a different way, setting reading goals, and achieving them.
For me, this was also a demonstration of how much can be accomplished by taking learning one step at a time. When we started, the wall looked pretty sorry and everyone wondered if we could ever fill it.
Within a couple of weeks, the quilt started to take shape.
Kids would pile in to see what others had read. They named their teams in order to identify which squares belonged to them and counted to make sure they were in the race for the pizza at the end.
Yesterday, the final square made it up onto the wall.
The kids couldn’t believe how much they accomplished and we all marveled at the 100+ books read over the course of the Summer.
Now, time for the celebration!
