Home Reading Can Be Fun

Home reading is a part of the Slovene language classes. Many a student takes it as a necessary evil and as something completely redundant. Despite teachers' efforts to bring literature closer to the student, we are often left with nothing more than summaries, taken from the Internet, poor test results and teachers' bad feelings of not having provided the students with enough motivation. This situation makes it highly important for the Slovene teachers to make at least part of home reading attractive for students. I have been trying for a number of years to pick the books that by themselves are pleasant to read, and to make classes more fun through the use of the elements of gamification. I would like to present some of such examples from practice, i.e. activities involved in dealing with some of the texts in 6th and 9th grades. As part of working on the book Bratovšèina Sinjega galeba (by Tone Seliškar), students created table games, where they creatively crossed the story with some well-known games, such as Frustration, Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders. When discussing ancient Greek fables in 7th grade, we created a Facebook profile – students portrayed the characters from individual fables by means of a Facebook profile. They were required to find a picture (of characters, such as Zeus, Aphrodite, Tantalus and Sisiphus), create their status, wall posts, interests, friends etc. In 9th grade we used The Little Prince (by A. de Saint Exupery) as the concept of a computer game. The objective of all these activities was to maintain the interest for literature and to develop creative thinking during teamwork.