Scheduling World Literature

This year is the year the English Department at my school gets to weed through curriculum and update. Because this happens only once every five years or so, I'm glad that it's taking place my third year at CCA.

For my 10th graders, I completely changed the novels they are reading. Many of their former novels are being passed down to 9th grade. The 10th grade focus is World Literature and my topic is: Stories of the Sea. We will be exploring questions of identity, duty, loyalty, and trust.

Here are the novels:

Things Fall Apart (summer reading)
Lieutenant Hornblower
Kon-Tiki
The Whale Rider
Twelfth Night
Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Once my book list was set, the next step was to tackle the schedule. As all English teachers know, it's quite challenging to fit in reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, and literature. Here's my tentative schedule (still a work in progress):

Yes, thank you Pages. I am aware that Vocab is not a real word.

Periods are 42 minutes long
Grammar - Caught'ya! Grammar: Monday, Wednesday, Fridays - 10 minutes
Vocab - Tuesday discussion, Friday Quiz (weekly quizzes mean less words per week) - 15-20 minutes
Independent Reading - Tuesday and Friday students may choose any book to read during this time, except the literature book - 15-20 minutes
Literature - Discussions, activities, projects, movies, Monday & Wednesday - 30 minutes
Writing - Timed essay every other week, free write every other week. The free write may be a blog post, book review on Amazon or Goodreads, a comment on an online article, etc. Thursday - entire class

Of course, this must be a flexible schedule to accommodate last minute events like snow days and special events.