Thursday, April 4, 2013

Acting to encourage additional reading

Today we did several activities after reading chapter 8 of El Nuevo Houdini

First,  the students read chapter 8 with a partner or alone.  Most of them feel comfortable reading the book and I provide support for any words that they don't know.  Many times as soon as a student asks me about a particular word, I write the word in Spanish and English on the board so as the other students encounter that word, they know to first check the board before asking me.
After the first reading, we did one of the exercises in the Teacher's Guide for a quick review.

Then I tried a new activity that required the students to read through the chapter an additional time.  Two students volunteered to play the roles of Brandon and Jamie.  I had copied 8 sentences from chapter 8 in Spanish and they had to act out each sentence, but with no talking and with no props.  

The rest of the students worked in groups of 2 or 3.  After they watched the students act out the first sentence, they searched for the sentence that was acted out in chapter 8 of El Nuevo Houdini.  Then one of the students in the group wrote the sentence on a marker board.  After a minute or two, they held up the marker boards and received a point if they wrote the correct sentence.  

I'll use this type of activity again because the students were engaged, reading different parts of the chapter the second time in order to find the right sentence.  In my first two classes, I had the students work in groups of 3, but the last class they worked in groups of 2 which worked much better because with only two, both of them had to work together to find the sentence and write it before the time was up.

5 comments:

  1. This sounds amazing! Thanks for sharing!

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  2. Love it. We're reading Houdini and Robo en la noche in my classes too- this is going into my plans asap! :)

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  3. Love this idea as well!

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  4. Another great way to ensure they really 'understood' what they are reading! Thanks!

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