When students understand a story, when they enjoy going over it with the artist’s work after creating it with their friends, when they do well on the quiz (on my first quiz every single student got an 8 out of 10 – 18 students), and then go home and proudly read the story to their parents for homework, it’s a celebration of what they have learned. They don’t have to do it; they want to do it.
Also, if they want, they can add to the story as a free write, since the other focus of their weekly homework is to do two free writes.
In thus requiring our students to read stories from class to their parents or write possible endings to it or just write on anything they choose for two ten minute periods a week, they begin to see working on their language as something pleasant. Once this attitude is in place, we set the stage for life long learning of a language, instead of seeing it as burdensome, tedious, involving annoying memorization of forms, and something they can’t do.
They can write more than two free writes if they want. They can also celbrate their growing knowledge of the language by checking out an FRV book to take home and read.
Dr. Krashen says about self-selected reading:
“There is massive evidence that self-selected reading, or reading what you want to read, is responsible for most of our literacy development. Readers have better reading ability, know more vocabulary, write better, spell better, and have better control of complex grammatical construction. In fact, it is impossible to develop high levels of literacy without being a dedicated reader, and dedicated readers rarely have serious problems in reading and writing.”