Reading Novels – An Idea

3 thoughts on “Reading Novels – An Idea”

1. Chris

   September 6, 2012 at 9:58 pm

   I started Pobre Ana today and I tried something that I didn’t try last year. I did the whole parallel character/novel thing. It actually went really well. We read a few sentences then I spent some time talking about them and creating a parallel character. It went extremely well and I’m starting to see the value in this parallel stuff, I never tried it last year. I’m also thinking of following Blaine’s advice of only reading it one day a week. We read it every single day in class last year, until we finished it, and I think that contributed to the hatred of it. What’s amazing is that I had all of these kids last year in 9-week Exploratory and their retention of everything we did is absolutely incredible. So the first few paragraphs of chapter 1 that we read today was a breeze.

   I did put the book into their hands, though. But things went okay. I think this parallel character thing is key to setting these novels up, especially these dry ones.

   Note to Spanish teachers, Mira Canion has a new novel out called Tumba and it looks amazing.

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2. Andrea Westphal

   September 9, 2012 at 2:16 pm

   Another idea (credit to Susie Gross) is to read the novel “Lickety-Split”. There was a thread on the moretprs list about how she took the last couple weeks of each quarter to read a novel. Anything the kids didn’t understand was quickly translated. No homework was assigned; the goal was to read for the sake of reading.

   I actually tried this last spring and used Pauvre Anne. While it’s not my favorite reader (my kids too had heard about it before and were not excited) the reading went well. As we read we discussed and poked fun at Anne’s attitude and some of her decisions as she traveled alone. I think at one point I had them convinced she might even get kid-napped. It went rather painless and gave me the chance to get caught up on grading for the quarter, etc.

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3. Ben Slavic

   September 9, 2012 at 11:28 pm

   I’m thinking of dropping FVR and going with SSR to start class with those ten minute reading periods and then doing Read and Discuss all day Friday – sans books but on the document reader- on what they read each day during the ten minute periods earlier in the week. I’m not big on FVR anymore – I think it is a false thing when you do it for ten minutes. I think it takes the brain that long to settle into it when you are a high school kid. A post from Kevin will appear in the queue here later this week – it’s a question about FVR.

   But this is just to suggest another option to reading the novels. I’ve tried Susan’s idea and it doesn’t work for me. Too much of a reading ability range, I think. So I plan to set it up during the week with ten minutes of SSR of the novel instead of FVR to start class and then devote Friday’s class to that discussion.

   I know, then I can’t do culture – poetry and music – on Friday. But I have found that if there is one truth about CI you have to backwards plan the text and pull vocab they don’t know and do PQA and stories for that so that the entire idea of teaching a poem or song that they have never seen is kind of bogus – they don’t have the vocabulary for it.

   Anyways, I have to get them reading more. My kids don’t really speak English, and they need to read read read in any language. So that’s what I am thinking about, anyway, as a way to do the novels. Friday would be Novel Day.

   I know, I know – I am calling into question the use of FVR as well as teaching poetry and music and other kind of cultural stuff in TPRS/CI classes and suggesting using the time gained thereby in reading novels. Hey, it’s my blog.

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