Eric shares:
I wanted to share something I’ve started doing in the first 5 minutes of class. I read one of the stories or MTs that we did earlier this year.
– It’s review.
– It’s building listening fluency, i.e. you can speed up your reading of a story that is so familiar.
– It’s visualization – especially when reading a video clip the students literally see the movie in their heads. A few of my students close their eyes and listen.
I stop a few times during the reading to ask a student what is going on (they respond in English).
I also have packets of all the stories/MTs/songs we’ve done this year and have also started class off by giving students 5-10 minutes to independently read from the packets.
To build student confidence and show them the size of their listening vocabulary, cut and paste the text into this word frequency counter:
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html
Do a quick “replace all” for accents before you cut and paste. Then, you can tell the kids how many different words are in the story!