People always complain about how shitty Blaine’s novels are. Stop it. Just use Movie Reading to make it enjoyable for the kids to listen. Read to them with a relaxed, permission giving, softness. Read to them with love. Give the characters in the novel a bit of personality, but not too much (let the kids add their own internal definition of character as well).
The feeling of relaxed enjoyment of Movie Reading, along with the Calming Music done during FVR, will cause the kids to forget how bad the novels are (criticisms and judgement are functions of the conscious mind and we teach our kids to be that way all the time in schools) and they will have a different experience of the novel.
Understand what reading lovingly means. It just means reading with a sense of respect for life. This can be conveyed, even in this world.
Here is what I want to say here:
The best Movie Reading occurs when one thing – and this is something that I don’t believe has been discussed anywhere in the TPRS community – is present in our voices when we read to our kids. When we do this kind of reading, when we try to make it into a movie in our students’ minds, we absolutely must read with love in our voices.
It sounds odd to say that in what we view as an academic setting, but schools are no more academic settings than machine shops or restaurants. All places are really just places where we can practice being loving and sharing a sense of peace and happiness with others. Especially children.
Krashen and Ray have shown that language instruction is not and has never been an academic, merely intellectual thing. Language instruction has always and must always involve the heart. The same feeling that we convey to the kids during Kindergarten Day is what we want to convey when we read to our students in Movie Reading.
We must read to them with love, that’s all I can say about it. If we read novels to them in a robotic way, none of this will work.