Calendar Journals And Activities for YA Lit Unit

Cover on upside down! I wrote last week about the novel unit that I was starting with my freshmen. Today will be day 6 of the unit so I thought I would write a little about it. The first most important thing about the unit is choice. Students choose their own book. I didn't have classroom sets of novels. I didn't give them a list of books to choose from. I didn't assign lit circles. They didn't have to choose a certain genre. The only requirement was it had to be "worthy" of them. Not something too easy (I'm pretty familiar with their reading levels). And it had to have some heft to it. It needed to make them think. They will read this young adult novel in fifteen days. They take the number of pages in the book, divide by fifteen and that's the number of pages they need to read a day. Each day, after reading their pages in class, they have two things to do. The first thing they do is fill out a calendar journal. Calendar journals was so