David Talone adds to the reading and writing arsenal:
I had less to do today, and was missing nearly half of my class due to trips, so I decided to wing it a bit. After 7 minutes of FVR, I told them that we were going to end the class with the word chunk game (which they LOVE) but that first we were going to look at the written story we read together in class yesterday. We looked at it on a site called textivate (here is the link to my story in Spanish http://www.textivate.com/rsdjn1 ). We did an activity to put the sentence chunks in the right order, and then also a gap-fill activity.
However, the most amazing thing happened when I asked them what version of “Fill in the Letter” they wanted to do. They told me they wanted to do the hardest level, which simply shows blanks for each letter of each word (so you know how many letters it has) and punctuation. I told them that I thought it was too hard for them, and they took it as a challenge.
The next 10-15 minutes were without a doubt the best, most enthusiastic, focused writing exercise that I have ever done. I typed, but they called out the words to write, and I made them come to a consensus (or vote) if there was a dispute. I asked them to spell out words for me, I paused at the endings of verbs to ask if it was -a the present ending or ó the past ending. They absolutely lapped it up. Of course it was a story that they had already seen, but they were making connections that they didn’t even know about in terms of grammar, all the while completely focused on the meaning of the text. I helped them, or glided past some parts that were tricky, but they made it through over half the text without making a single mistake (if I do it again, I would choose a couple of paragraphs, as this was too long).
In any case, I don’t want to sound like a shill for textivate, but I am sooo happy with this activity, and the kids were jumping up and down high-fiving one another as they got the words right. It´s good to share some success stories here as well as all the other crap.