A Novel Approach To Instruction

We’ve been asked just what kinds of reading material may be best suited to the kinds of creative, communicative, and authentic projects in which we expect our elementary students to be engaged. From one perspective, all kinds of reading material can provide adequate depth for the learning of skills and ideas for which we aim to provide. And in fact, variety is essential – fiction and non-fiction, article and story, poem and essay – students need to work with all manner of material for a well-rounded experience.

We have an affection for novels in particular, though. In using a novel in language arts instruction, one can bring virtually every reading skill into play. Furthermore, a novel can be fertile ground for allowing students to connect the material to their own lives in reflective and meaningful fashions – and those connections, incidentally, allow students to become more engaged in writing exercises. Students will read and write with more passion and more effort if they feel connected to the material. For those reasons and more, novels form the basis of most of the units that the DLA team has implemented in the past.

Here are a few recommendations for novels to use in upper elementary language arts instruction:

• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
  
• Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
  
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
  
• Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
  
• The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
  
• The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo
  

Because the tools and practices we recommend allow for individual work and team work, and do not in any way require whole-class projects, one can easily use multiple novels at one time in such a way that matches the challenge of the material to the relative reading levels of individual students. Students can use ThinkQuest, the Intel Thinking Tools, and Glogster during the same unit, for example, even if they are reading different novels. In this manner one can differentiate to meet all needs.

Have you used other novels successfully at the elementary level? We’d love to hear about them!