In the 2016-17 school year, I was in my second term as an AmeriCorps service member at Forest Grove High School. The prior year I spent as a full-time math tutor, but I decided to take on more responsibility the second time around and begin working with the reading department as well. In both departments, I worked with small pull-out groups of at-risk students—usually freshmen— and in a school whose population was 49% Hispanic, these students were often English language learners. My groups (4-7 students) would meet 2-3 times per week for an hour or so, usually for the last half of their math or reading class, where we would work on getting caught up with the curriculum, build on skills, and discuss the material.
For the first few months of the semester, I had trouble getting my reading students to engage with the books we read. The teacher would pick out a book for us, and we would work through it over the course of a few weeks, but I could tell the students weren’t very interested. They wouldn’t read outside of class, there was minimal participation in our discussions, and a general lack of enthusiasm around reading in general. Many of these students were testing at a 3rd or 4th grade reading level (in English).
I thought back to my early reading years, and some of my favorite books. I wanted to get the students started on a series of books, to captivate them longer than just a single novel. I also needed books that were accessible to young people, something fairly easy to read but with some humor, or at least relatable/compelling enough to maintain interest.
Furthermore, I knew these students needed a different mode of presentation than strictly text. They lacked confidence in their reading comprehension skills, so I wanted to give them other opportunities to absorb the story and supplement their readings. I chose A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. These books are clever, dark, funny, mysterious, and focus on vocabulary-building. They were made into a wonderful set of audiobooks featuring Tim Curry, an under-appreciated 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, and had just been released as a Netflix original TV series based on the books. We switched modalities on a daily basis: some days I would read aloud to the students, some days they would rotate reading aloud, and some days we would listen to the audiobooks. We even watched a few clips from the film on YouTube, and I assigned them homework to watch the Netflix episodes for whichever book we were reading.
It took a few weeks, but A Series of Unfortunate Events really caught on with my students. We had lively discussions in class, we juxtaposed the different media versions of the story, and would come up with predictions with what was going to happen in the next book. One girl, who was on the verge of expulsion at the beginning of the year, was asking me to borrow the books to read at home by the spring semester because she got so excited about the series. Between late-November and mid-May, we had finished the first 6 books of the series, which was a tremendous accomplishment for those young students, and several of them promised to continue the series over the summer and beyond.
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