Reading Option A

3 thoughts on “Reading Option A”

1. Ruth

   November 13, 2013 at 6:55 pm

   I’ve just been reading old posts about this.
   I’ve done a few stories this year, probably too early, but they seemed to work okay. I’ve shied away from doing enough of the CWB-type stuff that I should have been doing. I’m not sure why.
   Anyways, I just started something based on the questionnaires that had been gathering dust. We’re having a “Star of the Day” – “La vedette du jour,” complete with duct tape microphone. It’s kind of like a really elaborate and repetitive introduction to this semi-fictional character who has been in class for the past 2 months. Maybe just my take on CWB or something.
   Not sure how often we’ll do this. I don’t see my classes every day. I’ve done a couple that worked pretty well. The 8th graders and I managed 22 minutes in French.
   The connection to this post is that I wrote the “interviews” up, as if they were stories, to use with Reading Option A. I also printed them out for the kids to read and underline words they didn’t know, and they will translate it soon, too. I am still working on how we do ROA, so I am happy to have more things to read. This was really quick. One day for talking about the Star, and then read about him or her the next time. Plus, we’ll have a collection of bizarre character sketches by the end of the year.
   Thanks for addressing the temptation to add too many new words to the reading, Ben. A few is good, though, because the context is pretty strong.

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2. David Maust

   November 14, 2013 at 4:24 pm

   I had just posted this on the “old” Reading Option A post, but this is probably a better place for it because it relates to Ben’s video in this post.

   Also – I noticed that Ben mentioned he’s probably introducing too many new words and I can see that is a concern. I know I probably did too many too (15 words), but some were just different forms of words they already knew, or simple interjections. In the future though, I would probably cut down my number of unfamiliar vocab. Here’s what I posted in the old post.

   —

   I really appreciate this being reposted. I tried several of the steps today in Latin 1 and it went well.

   One thing that I noticed helped in my situation – although I had a 3 location story to start with (we were doing Matava’s “Lazy!”), I did a reading version that just elaborated details from the first location only. This gave me the opportunity to add in dialogue, some additional characters and details, as well as about 15 new words that were fairly easy to get from context. I also used some vocabulary from the past stories and CWB from the beginning of the year.

   I love the suggestion to have those new words in there for kids to underline. I spent about 5 min. giving definitions for those words before the group read. Then the kids were supposed to find them in the story and underline them as they read. Here’s what my steps looked like – took about an hour with one brainbreak.

   We created the story over last week and did a choral translation of all three locations with some R and D the day before.

   Today we:
   1. -did 3 textivate activities on the LCD projector as a class of just the first location.

   2. -I passed out the expanded reading of the first location with a word bank of the 15 new words at the top. I took 5 min. to go over these words. (The story was one side of the paper).

   3. -Students read the story silently, underlining the new words and words they didn’t recognize.

   4. -Choral translations with pauses for discussion in L2. (didn’t do any pop-up grammar but could have)

   Brain Break

   5. -Had kids take out a sheet of notebook paper and put up 8 questions about the story (in L2). Kids had to write the question and response using a sentence in L2. I helped them along orally. I only showed one question at a time (on powerpoint) and gave time before moving on to keep everyone working at the same pace.

   6. -Did a comprehension check (fingers), asked for feedback.

   7. Would have done quiz, but was out of time, and kids seemed done after writing responses to questions.

   I really felt like kids seemed to be hitting the new vocab during the choral translation. The NET was doing it’s job! Pretty cool thing to see.

   Thanks!!!

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3. Ben Slavic

   November 14, 2013 at 6:18 pm

   …the NET was doing it’s job! Pretty cool thing to see….

   Yes, as in:

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