The World Language department at my school is making reading in the target language a priority this year. Below is the bulletin board outside of my Spanish classroom and Krista Kovalchick's French/Latin classroom. There are four 5x7 photos of the 4 WL teachers and the other photos are some of the students in Krista's and my classes. There are a few photos that we will add in the next few days to complete the bulletin board.I have a rather extensive classroom library partially from buying books with our school budget, but the majority of the books I buy from amazon or the publishers with my personal money. Krista does the same with buying books for her classroom, but it is a bit more difficult for her because there are not as many French and Latin books written specifically for second language learners are there are for Spanish language learners.
My plans are to write a grant and buy additional books to build up the classroom libraries so all the WL teachers have a nice selection in their classrooms from which the students can choose during SSR.
I'm waiting for 4 new books from Fluency Matters as well as other books that I have heard about that will soon be published. You can never have too many books for your students, right? :-)
We continue to read class novels together; 1 in level 1; 2 in levels 2 and 3; 3 (or more) in levels 4 and 5. Below are photos of my classroom library. One of the racks has children's books that I rotate after two or three weeks. I have a huge collection of children's books from an earlier grant and from a teacher that moved to the middle school and gave the books to me. I don't make those as accessible because the language and grammar is usually more difficult than the novels.
