I used to do FVR with the children’s books. It really didn’t work. The books had lots of really complex language in them that only native speaker kids could understand, and my students mainly just looked at the picture.
So then I started doing SSR with the same text. Then after the 10′ SSR period to start class, we would R and D the common text that we had just read together. Then I could give a quiz.
The drawback there was that we ended up losing time on story creation – creating stories is a lot more interesting than talking about a book. And the quiz ate up class time and my own time because I had to write the quiz in advance.
So now I lay out on the reading table about four copies each of Blaine’s and Carol’s books and they get to choose which book to read. Knowing that they can pick up what they want to read is a big motivator.
So I guess I’m back to FVR, but not with children’s books. Those books are for native speakers and have huge amounts of complex words in them, which isn’t comprehensible input.