Reading Roll Call was a classroom activity I conducted with my students at the beginning of every week during in-person instruction to see what they were reading independently. The practice has been shelved during the 2020-2021 school year with 100% virtual instruction causing barriers to book access and time. When enacted in the classroom, I always shared the title of a book that I was reading to model participation and showcase the lifelong commitment to reading that I’ve made.
The Reading Roll Call idea stems from Donalyn Miller‘s book Reading in the Wild. I have adapted the activity and idea into blog form to track my reading progress on a weekly basis. Happy Reading!
With last week’s Reading Roll Call book, The Broken Girls finished and a book review on the way, I think I’m getting the hang of this reading this once again.
This week’s book has been on my To Be Read list for a long time. It was recommended to me in high school and has always been a book that I would get to in the future. Well, after years of kicking the can down the road, the book has fallen back into my lap.
The Literature Club that I have been advising this year has selected it as their next read. I’m looking forward to seeing what this book is all about and listening to the discussion about the book in upcoming meetings!
From the Back of the Book
“The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
The Glass Castle is truly astonishing – a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.”