My son is starting 7th grade this year (I know, it's killing me!). At the end of the year they send home a summer reading list and usually Nicholas is beside himself eager to read the recommended books - ALL the books. But this year something strange happened, the list was... boring. He was completely uninterested in the titles. They were not challenging and he flat out told me that. So I urged him to suffer through just one of them just to be able to say that he participated. Do you know what his reply to me was? "You know Mom, last year all we had to do was write a paragraph about a book we read. I do that with every book I read on Shelfari."
That statement spoke volumes to me. He's not being challenged in school, like he and his friends challenge themselves. They're already having discussions around books, forming book groups, doing their OWN reading inventories and going one further... they're creating role play games based on books they read. All using Web 2.0 during the summer no less. The RPG they created is based on the book, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's a good read, and would be very thought provoking in the classroom. But, as Nick reminded me, there are many different classrooms out there, not just the type we find with a chalkboard.
