My school has an interesting schedule. Monday, Tuesday and Friday we operate on a traditional schedule. Students go through periods 1-8. Wednesdays and Thursdays are our dedicated block days. On Wednesdays, students have their odd numbered classes for about 80 minutes and on Thursdays they have their even numbered classes.
Eighty. Minutes.
That's a long time! Fortunately, I've been in the business long even now that I have a semblance of an idea what I'm doing. I have a curriculum I love, I have some activities I can pull out of my sleeve at any time, and all of that. But even with that structure, eighty minutes is a long time to plan and prep for.
Enter free reading.
Granted, free reading isn't usually more than about ten minutes in my class. But it's still amazing, and a small chunk of time that I don't have to have a specific plan for.
I have spent the last 3-4 years building up my little library of Spanish readers so that I have enough books to accommodate student interests and ability levels, and just to have enough for each kid to have at least one in some of my larger classes. Most of my books are either from Fluency Matters (which apparently just merged with Wayside Publishing) or from TPRS books.
To aide my students in selecting a book that's appropriate for where they're at in their Spanish, I have a leveled system using colored stickers.
I honestly have no idea where these stickers came from or how long I've had them. But they have helped me keep my little library a little more organized.
I have a color associated with each approximate level. Green is for novice low/mid. Pink is for novice mid/high, and on it goes. Just this year I separated the past and present books onto separate shelves. Year 1 students spend the majority of their time in the present tense, so I like to have the books separated so that they can maximize their comprehension. I also wanted them to see that the vocabulary was not necessarily more difficult in certain books, it was just past v. present tense.
Students pick whatever book they want to read, we read (silently, to ourselves) for 8-10 minutes, and then students return their books from where they got them.
Q and A
When do you start free reading?
It depends on the group of kiddos. With my current sophomores, I started with them in about April, maybe March of their freshman year. That was earlier than I had done with my previous class. In my classroom, we've at least gone through 6-7 units of the Somos curriculum before we begin free reading. Before that, it's hard for students to have enough vocabulary to follow along in a story.
What readers would you recommend?
What do you the teacher do during free reading?
How do you pay for readers?
I think the most rewarding thing about free reading as a teacher is when I ask students to talk about what they're reading. Usually, I let them talk in partners or group. I will write a few questions on the board. Today it was:
-What is your book about?
-Do you like it?
-Would you recommend it to someone else?
I get to listen to their Spanish and hear what they have learned and what they're understanding. It's incredible how their brains pick up the language and how they learn new words, and even how to pronounce them, even without having hard them before. Earlier this week one of my year two students whipped out "hay mucho ruido" and I was floored. Is that an incredibly advanced statement? No, not necessarily. I just know that we've never covered that in class, and she used what she had learned in free reading to create new language.
Three cheers for free reading.
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