DI

I have been working on developing differentiated instruction for a unit on The Great Gatsby. Also, my co-op and I are discussing how we might add DI into our upcoming unit on The Catcher in the Rye. Our plan is to provide students with options for their assessment while having them focus on answering one prompt related to the text. In other words, students can pick from a list of project ideas and work to answer an overarching question through their selected project. At the moment our assignment possibilites are divided into categories: Visual (advertisement, collage, video), Auditory (speech, debate, lecture, round table discussion, news broadcast, music), Written (essay, story, poetry, letter, blog), and Kinesthetic (role play, dramatization, experiment). They are broken up this way in hopes of appealing to the multiple intelligences. It's exciting to see the foundation of DI focused unit develop. In addition to this final assessment, we will be assessing their knowledge of vocab throughout the unit and will be using either reading check quizzes, study guide checks, or reader response journals for formative assessments.
Any ideas for how to creatively assess the students throughout the unit? I personally think the implementation of reading journals (if done creatively) could be beneficial to the students but i'm hesitant about how to get the kids excited about it. They are used to reading check quizzes and study guides (most of which either don't prepare for or don't bother filling out). I want to try to get the students more involved with the text as they go through the unit, any ideas?