But I've seen the Movie!

Apparently I was supposed to have a 5th blog up earlier than this...whoops.  I'm so behind right now D:


Since my students have been done with their unit for a while, they've been working on CRCT lately, we haven't had much time to discuss books, but I have noticed something interesting about my students lately.  With the CRCT coming up, my host teacher pulled out the "riff books" again for the students to choose from.  These books, given to the school for free, allow the students to choose a book and keep it, adding it to their own personal collection.  What I noticed the most with my students however, is that they all choose the smallest and shortest looking books that they can find.  So when they started choosing books, I tried to get them more towards something more challenging than "A Tour with the Jonas Brothers."  However, most of my students would pick up a book and turn it over once or twice, toss it back in the bin and go "this is too big."

Another thing that I noticed was that when choosing certain books the students also tended to not care if one was in a series or not.  For example, the students who loved Harry Potter would pick up book four and I would ask them "have you read the other three?" Their response, "no, but I've seen the movies."  Just broke my heart.


So my big question here is...how do you convince students to move on towards more challenging text?  Sure we want them to read what interests them, but at an appropriate level.  Also, when a student uses the excuse "I've seen the movie,"  is it really that easy just to tell them that there are differences between a movie and book, or do they really just not care?  It seems like this is going to be a great challenge for me...having them read books that they like, but at their reading level.


--edit--

I also wanted to share a success story about the "Chalk Talk" that my students did with me during the final week of our TWS.  I had my students do a Chalk Talk on symbolism and symbols.  We went from everything from symbols in our book to worldly symbols.  What I found the most interesting though was that most of my students couldn't think of any symbols after they had the ones form the books. They could name ones from the books we've been reading without fail.  But when it came to thinking of symbols in the world, the students minds were pretty much blank.  So I tried to coax them into thinking about places where they shop, eat, things that we see in our country.  When I gave them these hints, the list went on forever!  The board got so full we had to switch to another page on the promethean board! But it just astounded me that the students didn't know that their places like McDonald's or Aeropastle, had symbols or icons.  It was almost as if the word "symbol" confused them.  Has anyone else ever had this problem?  Would you use a better word or different word than symbol?  I'm trying to think of how this might be less confusing for students in the future...