Adolescent Lit Fun

One of the classes that is required to take at my college when studying to be an English Education teacher is Adolescent Literature. It's a fun class where you get to learn about the different styles of literature and about the ways to be able to teach the books to your class. We read about 8-9 books and analyze what about each book can be a teachable moment. This is easily one of my favorite classes I am taking and it is hands down the funniest. We can start talking about the book for that week and eventually end up somehow randomly naming Disney movies where the villain falls to their death (Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Lion King, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast). Tonight in particular we had to find a picture book that we could use in a classroom and defend why we chose that book. My friends and I all chose a wide range of books. Mason decided to choose a chapter picture book by picking The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Kate decided to go with a book that had a lot of impact in the pictures in it. She chose Rules of Summer that was written by Shaun Tan. He has wrote several picture books that are all impactful and deal with issues that children don't have to deal with unless it has touched their lives in some way. Lena went out and bought a book called, Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt that was written by Kate Messner and illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal. Lena's book was a cute book that talked about how to care for plants. Lena had said that she should use this book in her class and assign a project with it. Each student would have to

keep a plant alive and if the plant died their grade died. Lena sure does have a comical outlook on teaching and life. When trying to choose what book I should bring to class I had to really think about what book best represented the type of classroom I wanted to have. I ended up bringing The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. This is a book that can cause a lot of commotion depending on what point of view people are looking at it form. That's the type of classroom I want. I want students to be able to express their opinions in class without feeling like they are going to be judged. Adolescent Lit has become one of those milestone classes for a teacher to take because it really gets them thinking about what kind of teacher they really want to be. I can not wait to see what the rest of the semester turns out to be like.