When I was in the fourth grade, three or four of my classmates and I were put into an experimental reading group, which in fact was not a group at all. We were each free to choose the books we wanted to read. I don’t recall if we chose books from the school library, or if a specific set of books was made available to us. We could read at our own pace. We never met as a group. There must have been a written assignment, or some one-on-one discussion with the teacher, after completing a book, but I’m not sure. (There may have been something about “modules”, whatever they would have been.) I remember two of the books that I read for school that year – Little Women, which I know, to this day, was 533 pages long, and Death Be Not Proud, which was the first book I ever read that made me cry.
Being a part of this non-group made me feel special. Being able to read what I wanted, as quickly as I wanted, made me feel free.
