Right about now many of us are getting into stories. We’ve normed our classroom for behavior and rules and we’ve done a lot of personalizing via CWB, the questionnaire, etc. When we get our first story under our belts, we naturally have to include Step 3 – Reading.
I personally would first rather teach my kids to read via Step 3 stories than novels. So presented via video below is the way I use Reading Option A, developed three years ago at East High School. I share it as one option for reading classes that were based on stories created in class:
As I look back over some of these vids, esp. the second one in the top link above, I can see that I go far too wide/out of bounds by introducing too many new (underlined in pink) words into the reading, which Laurie and Michele I’m sure noticed if they saw these vids. I don’t do that anymore. This is a second year class and the kid with all the hair got the second highest score in CO and fifth in the nation on the National French Exam, and that was the last year I played that game. One thing also to add here is that this strategy (ROA) is really just going back and forth between translating the text and discussing it, and so in that sense it does very much resemble, at its core, R & D. And another thing to mention is I overexplain pop up grammar in these videos. It should be ____ means____ and that’s it. Yet another thing to notice is that discussing things in English is just fine during these readings. Translating into English is just fine. It all helps. But the reader is cautioned that in these videos I really do use just plain too much English. I ‘ve gotten better at that in more recent years.
For the actual Reading Option A steps, click on:
www.benslavic.com/blog/reading-option-a-latest-update-2013/
Here is the link to the discussion of the artist’s drawing, which, along with the Quick Quiz, are the final two parts we do in Step 2 and so have preceded what you see in the Reading Option A links above:
www.benslavic.com/blog/videos/bubhakemeier-3/ (fast forward to 2:12 to see how we interpret what the artist drew while we were making the story)