Tina and I see a lack of availability of high quality, short, simple and inexpensive readers in our community. We therefore are putting out a call for a new kind of reader that fits the above descriptors that provides lessons in culture besides just good stories.
We want to promote a new genre of reader, from new authors. We are tired of the old. We don’t care if these new readers align perfectly with any high frequency lists – we feel that high frequency lists should not provide the underpinnings of a level 1 reader, but rather interest.
Besides interest, we want simplicity and brevity. If you have such a thing, or are considering writing something like this for your classes anyway, please send anything for review to me at benslavic@yahoo.com.
We don’t know yet what exact form this new genre of ultra-simple level 1 books will take in terms of sales – it will probably be through Amazon – but we will figure that out and all authors who work with us will be properly financially remunerated. Perhaps this PLC is a good venue for developing such a product for the overall CI community . The things we have developed here over the years have always been really good because of the privacy factor. Too many critics out there….
Tina and I refuse the classroom set/everybody-reads-the-same-thing-at-the-same time reading approach as a waste of instructional minutes and as insulting to our students’ identities as individual readers. Shifting away from class set reading of novels and choosing rather to have kids read on their own during class has proven to be the right decision for us.
We used to call the practice of asking students to read as individuals SSR and/or FVR d’après Krashen, but now we prefer the term “Free Choice Reading”. There has always been confusion about what those terms actually mean.*
Sowe like this new term – Free Choice Reading. But we need the novels.
There is a verb in French –
se débarrasser de – to get rid of
We don’t like the expense and complexity of what is out there now, not to mention the fairly limited artistic vision and occasional biases revealed, and so we now request anything new that might deliver the elements described above. We want to get rid of the old way of doing novels in our instruction – it just felt too heavy on the kids and on us.
Any takers?
*People say they are doing FVR but it is neither free nor voluntary. And the term SSR as per Krashen means that the teacher has to sit in front of the group and read; but we are no longer in school, we are teachers. And we have too many emails to read everyday. So for Tina and I it is now FCR.