Leer es Poder

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. 

A Map of Spanish Readers

In 2004, when I left my middle school Spanish job and moved to another district to teach high school Spanish at Palmyra, there were very few Spanish readers/novels available to use in the classroom. The previous teacher left me with a class set of novels that was more suitable for an upper college level class, (and which were still shrink-wrapped so he must have had the same reaction to the books), and a splattering of other readers, such as El Cid, Don Quijote, Leyendas lationamericanas, Historias de la Artámila, and several others.  The ones that were most useful were 3 readers by Arturo de Rosa about the detective Pepino González. I used the Pepino readers with my Spanish 4 class although it took a lot of scaffolding to make it accessible, (especially since teaching with CI was not common practice at the high school when I started working at Palmyra so their reading in the language experience was very limited).  

However, in the last several years the number of Spanish readers available have exploded! Spanish teachers have a wide variety of readers to choose from to read with their students and to add to their class library for independent reading. If you're like me, and you want to keep the most recent Spanish books in your classroom to give your students a full range of books from which to choose, you are quite busy buying books throughout the year.

Not only are there loads of novels to choose from, and more added each year, but you can find a reader/novel that takes place in almost every single Spanish country, with only one exception - Paraguay.

I like visuals, so I created a map of the countries aligned with the readers that take place in each country. 

(I'll give the authors a week or so to email me any corrections and then I'll upload the maps to google docs so you can download them if needed.)

The danger to writing this post and making the visuals, is I may have unintentionally omitted a book. If that is the case, please let me know and I can add it although it may take a few days until I can update this post. The three main sites I cross-referenced for the list above was CI Reading (blog by Mike Peto), Fluency Matters, and TPRS Books. 

In addition, there are some readers that are listed in language catalogs that I have that I did not add because I do not recommend them for any level. 

There are only a few books in the lists above that I have not read; some I have not read because they are not available for purchase yet. Obviously, I have my favorites and there are some on the list that I was disappointed with, for various reasons. However, that is a personal preference and what I thought was not an interesting story, may be something that one of my students like, so I continue to make as many books available to my students as I can.  

I also add a few Spanish children's books in the selection and switch them out for different ones after a month or so. Since I liked the Pepino series, I make them available too.  :)  

Free Voluntary Reading - PAEF Grant

Today was the official start of Free Voluntary Reading with my Spanish 4 classes. I followed the format that Laurie Clarq outlined in her blog and things went smoothly.

The students and I read for 15 minutes, which I really enjoyed because I wanted to finish the book "Vida y muerte en la Mara Salvatrucha" - I HIGHLY recommend it to any Spanish teachers. Then the students wrote the 3-sentence summary, page # & last line read, and if they liked it or not and why. It was interesting listening to the comments of the students as they were writing the summaries: some said how interesting their books were, others were pleased at how much they had read, some asked about a word that they didn't know (they weren't allowed to ask me during the FVR time), and on and on.

BUT, the BEST PART of the FVR was when 3 students asked if they were allowed to take the books home to continue reading! Of course, I said yes - well, actually I said "Sí".

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I'm following the steps that Laurie Clarq used to introduce FVR to her students. Tomorrow they will have 10-15 minutes of FVR and on Friday as well. Then, starting next week, my sts will have FVR twice a week. 

I was able to start my collection of books thanks to a grant I wrote to my school's education foundation, Palmyra Area Education Foundation.  I was thrilled when I heard I received a $600 grant to spend on books for FVR. 

Attached is a list of the novels I bought through TPRS Publishing, Inc. and Teacher's Discovery. (I also bought 25-30 children's books through e-bay that are not included on the list, but I wanted the students to settle into a short novel for the FVR experience.)

HAPPY READING TO ALL!