With many schools moving to online learning around the world I wanted to share a resource that might be of support. One popular option for online or remote learning is the Novel Study. It combines the advantages of encouraging students to read with ease of management and the opportunity to encourage reflection upon what is read. Often this is supported by a set of questions or activities, but they are sometimes very specific to a particular novel and may not require a great deal of thinking. This Novel Study Guide aims to overcome that by linking selected thinking moves to parts of a text. The result is a mash up of thinking routines with close looking at particular features of novels or narrative texts. It is hoped that this approach develops skills which would transfer to other situations where a detailed analysis of a text is desirable.
The site is structured in two ways. You can either begin by selecting a Thinking Move you would like your students to be using (e.g. Reasoning with Evidence or Capturing from the Heart) or target a particular feature of the text (e.g. places, people, events).
The site has been constructed quickly and will continue to evolve. Feedback is welcome using the comments below. You can also download the site as a PDF which allows parts to be copied into other formats.
Access the site HERE
By Nigel Coutts