Goals

Introduce First Amendment principles and Banned Books week, get students to think about what banned book to read, and build excitement about the banned books reading process project.

 

Details

Duration: 120 minutes

Assessments: Student discussions, Other (enter below)

Additional Assessment Type: Student handouts for banned book choices

Materials: Banned books library (we received a donation of books from Donors Choose), Class set of Maurice Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen" - ISBN 9780064434362

 

Description

1. We guided students in a class discussion through the PowerPoint, "Banned Books Introduction". It covers First Amendment Principles, Banned Books Week, a list of commonly banned books, and additional directions which are covered in the following steps. The main question we asked them to discuss was, "Why do you think books are banned?".

2. Upon discussing First Amendment Principles and Banned Books Week, as a class, we read "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak. Upon reading the book, we discussed with the students whether they thought the book should be banned or not.

3. After finishing the discussion, we introduced a handout called, "Getting the Lay of the Land" which asked students to go through a library of banned books, which was donated to us through Donors Choose. Through this process we asked students to go and preview at least 3 books they might want to read.

4. The last item on the agenda was to collect the "Getting the Lay of the Land" handouts the students completed at the end of the period so that we could see the variety of choices students had so that we could see to it that we had enough of the books students chose.

Handout - Getting the Lay of the Land
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PowerPoint - Banned Books Introduction
PowerPoint...
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Author Reflections

This lesson was a great to have students have choice in what they read for the upcoming reading process project. It got them much more excited about reading versus just assigning one book for the entire class. Although it would have been ideal to go over the First Amendment principles with an additional activity, our major goal was to get students excited about reading banned books and this activity really got students into that mode.