To Kill a Mockingbird

I am teaching my favorite book. This caused me some worries when I first started, mainly because I was concerned that having to read this book a total of 6 times a day would make me not enjoy it as much. Also, it's tough to teach a book that I love because I get really frustrated when students complain about it. So we have a rule: No complaints until we have completed the entire book. I tell them, yes it may be boring in the beginning, a little slow in the middle, or just overall not interesting, but you can't say the book "sucks" until you've read the whole thing. After we're finished they can diss it as much as they want. This rule seems to be working well for my students and even better, many are really enjoying the book! On this upcoming Tuesday we're reading Chapter 15 which is when Dill comes up with the plan to lure Boo out with lemon drops, so I'm giving the kids lemon drops on Tuesday. I hope they appreciate the little things!

The one cool thing that I wasn't expecting is that my students have started a lot of discussions about the food. A lot of the scenes dealing with food are also teaching Scout about manners and proper behavior. We also talk about how in the book lunch is referred to as dinner and we talk about how our grandparents say the same thing. My students don't know this yet but I have talked to the local chicken places and they are going to donate enough chicken so that we can have a true Southern Style dinner when we finish the book. We'll have fried chicken, beans, sweet tea, lane cake and some other sides. I'm so excited and I hope that even if they hate the book, they can look back on this year and think they had a pretty cool teacher who tried to get them to be enthusiastic about reading!