Reading Option A Update – November 2015

1 thought on “Reading Option A Update – November 2015”

1. Eric Herman

   September 12, 2015 at 2:42 pm

   I bet we can all think of other “steps” or fun extension activities that we do on reading day. Here’s some of my “big hitters”:
   1) Back-to-the-screen retells (credit: Betsy Paskvan): students stand with back to projected reading and a partner or the teacher reads a few lines and the students gesture
   2) Partner T/F game: pencil between partners, teacher says a sentence, if false the students grab the pencil, 1 point for correct response, -1 point for wrong response. Winner is first to 5 pts or if partner gets -5.
   3) Freeze frame: This was a favorite of my classes! And although a lot of L1 happens in the 10-15 minutes to act and take the pictures, you have tons of compelling pictures for follow-up CI. The students get roles and freeze on the teacher’s command, while the student job “photographer” takes pictures. These pictures can later be looked at and discussed. And even subtitled if you’re feeling fancy.
   4) Speed read: I never bought into speed writes. Maybe because I teach middle school novices, but the kids disliked the most the writing and there was always a few students for which this activity didn’t build confidence, since they weren’t ready for the output. And I never could reconcile the activity with my understanding of acquisition. Actually, I’ve decided that my students will do NO writing this year and I predict that this will not make a difference on their writing skill.
   So, I will try speed reading a parallel story this year. I’ll just change names, places, and a few details about the class story. I’ll also write an easy 5 question T/F quiz. That shouldn’t take me more than 10-15 minutes, but I can reuse this speed reading will all the classes that are doing TPRS with the same targets.
   Either the kids will get a copy of the story or it will be projected. You need copies of the quiz that students will get up and get when they finish reading. Students will record their time and quiz score. I’m sharing with you all the graph I use from the speed reading course: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6n9VA2R4h9Ic3NUOF9TQURLRmc/view?usp=sharing
   You will have to get rid of the vertical “time” axis, unless you go through the trouble of making all your stories exactly 400 words long as in the course. In a speed reading course, all the readings have the same number of words. But you can also write your own stories of variable word size and then use a simple excel document that will automatically calculate words-per-minute. Here’s one for you:
   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18-81PoPZ2YE5ZquCa6aTCBH_r_pPk8EKSqv3HoVxVdE/edit?usp=sharing
   Simply enter the number of words from your speed reading in the highlighted cell “C2” and voila. Copy and paste columns B and C above the quiz that the kids get.
   I want to try this year to make step 3 into more of an aural CI class and to not treat step 3 like a fixed-text class. By that I mean that I don’t want the class to revolve around and discussion to be confined to an already-written text. While that approach is easy on the teacher, student attention wanes.
   So, we could PQA, create a parallel story, modify the current story, add a new scene or new ending, or ask “why” and go back in time and make up a back-story to explain the facts of the current story. I am going to try and see if I can blend PQA and parallel story creation by using the story to compare and contrast it with a real/fictional experience of a student in my class.

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