There are so many classrooms in DPS with stacks of Blaine’s Extended Readings for Look I Can Talk! Those blue books. Some are purple, at least in French. I have always thought them a waste until now. We have our district assessments in two weeks and those readings – written for level 1 and the Look I Can Talk! series, include a lot of basic vocabulary. So I tried this today and it worked:
The story is usually on the left with the drawing and the long reading on the right page. Today I asked the kids to read the story silently, looking at the pictures, and then translate the long reading that follows the drawing into Spanish or English from the French. This silent reading and translation work is good practice for the assessment.
This was for level two. The plastic animals are all over the place in those books. The readings give good review of French 1 vocabulary in general. The kids learn to infer meaning, as Dori mentioned here a few days ago. (I think inferring meaning from context is good with kids who are advanced enough to read simple texts with ease, but not good for lower level kids who are not good readers yet.)
Why mention this in a post here? Well, most of us are dragging our feet with our kids right now in April. Lot’s of burnout out there. Why try auditory CI in those conditions when reading silently or doing R & D teaches them as much if not more at this time of year? (A general plan could be lots and lots of auditory CI in the first semester, gradually switching to more and more reading in the second, as classes that were improperly normed in the fall now turn into acne angry classes.)
Worked for me today, anyway. I bailed to those readings by Blaine minutes before class started bc I felt that with some snow here and it being a Monday and the first day of the last grading period, I didn’t want to get all audible on them. So I pulled out those extended readings and they had a good day reading in silence, with occasional whispering across the aisle for a translation but very limited.
It’s a good April bail out move.
