Mystery readers
Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 07:23AM Cool idea from one our high school library media specialists:
Volunteer "mystery readers" needed!
In honor of I Love to Read month, [the principal] has graciously allowed us to start SSR time for 3 Fridays with a mystery reader.
What does a mystery reader do?
Read over the intercom for no more than one minute at the start of SSR. If you have a particular well-known (or not-so-well-known) paragraph, you may provide your own. If you think you would need help with a selection, I have a few available. Just email me if you'd like to be a reader. ...
How and why should classes participate?
The mystery reader will only read for a minute or so. After the reader is done, the class should decide who the reader is and what they just read. There might even be a prize for most (appropriately) creative answer! It would probably work best for the teacher to email me the answers. The classes who are correct will be announced in the bulletin on Monday, plus they will go into a drawing for a prize to be given the following week.
Please help us promote reading this month by participating in this fun low-stress event!
Were I a mystery reader, this would be my paragraph - the best one ever written IMHO:
When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills, where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream would have no way to get in. Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
An entire love story in a single paragraph.
Your favorite paragraph?
Reader Comments (5)
Oh I love to read about ten pages of Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook over and over when I feel the need to read a romance, but if I read that aloud for a middle school activity, I'd probably lose my job! This is a fantastic idea by the way! Thanks for sharing, and let the LMS know i very well may use this idea!
Don't have the book handy, but it would definitely be from The Alchemist or Maniac Magee.
I'm coming out of lurk mode to comment, because my favorite sentence ever, was also written by Gabriel Garcia Marques:
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
That's the first sentence from Love in the time of Cholera
"It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world."
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Tough one. Either Jack Finney's Time and Again, pg. 55, mid-paragraph: "Out there lies the day you walked through this morning; it is filled with the inescapable facts that make it today. It will be almost identical tomorrow, very likely, but not quite." Then, of course, Norton Juster's beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth, pg. 9, describing Milo: "When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out, he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somehwere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him-- least of all the things that should have."