One of my favorite end-of-year activities with students is a passion speech. They choose something they love and spend time convincing the rest of us to love it too. But before that, I have them do a “rant” activity.

No grammar rules. No structure. Just pure chaos. They can complain about anything they can’t stand.

This year’s rants thus far have included some great topics: Caillou, Wapol from One Piece, and, one of my personal favorites to bring here, Hatchet.

The student said, “If I had to read another line about that dude staring at the lake or eating berries, I was going to buy a hatchet just to throw it at the book.”

I always end up in tears by the time I finish reading all of their pieces. But, now I need to know, what book would you stand on a hill and scream about at the top of your lungs?? Or if you just want to rant about something, what would it be??

I hope everyone read that in King Julien’s voice as I intended.

So, Boundlings, does anyone else feel like levels 1-4 come relatively quickly and then the jump in the amount of points to 5 feels like it takes forever?

Signed, Someone longing for level 6

I woke up today thinking about this because I have read and hear comments that say that people won't read certain books or finish them because they felt like the book was "stupid" or that it gives them a headache because the book is "so simple". In my case, I enjoy most books I read and I can even give it a 5 star rating because it either brought out a strong emotion in me (rage, sadness, etc.), or I just enjoyed the story of the book and could appreciate the way it was written and I did not analyze it or thought that the story or narrator was "dumb" or something. In general I do not do the analyzing books thing, specially with fiction, and I would like to hear from people how do they approach reading. Is it something that needs to be like studying, is it for enjoyment, is it for critique? I'm genuinely curious.