Reading Results

Once again I have found that ELLs' reading comprehension has increased through extended reading time. My students read or listened to recorded books for at least 60 minutes per day for 4 weeks. Most students made six months gain in comprehension in less than a month. The other activity that seemed to help was to complete an EZ Cloze paragraph each day. This took about 15 minutes. After completing a paragraph at their seats, they moved to the carpet to highlight and check answers. Using a highlighter was fun and kept them from changing their answers. They chose a title for each paragraph which helped with main idea. I think this activity helped them understand how cloze paragraphs work, too.

I shared their improved reading levels with them after lunch today. We talked about how reading more helped them read better. Now if only we could spend more time reading at school instead of un-ending test prep junk.

Weekend Reading

My weekend reading assignment is to make a CD of a book for next week in summer school. The kids are clamoring to read TIGER, a fictional book about the five ancestors of Kung Fu. I have read it before and it is exciting and funny. The kids will love listening to it. I just need to find enough quiet time to record it.

In the non-quiet time I am going to finish reading CHILDREN OF THE LAMP. It is a very engaging and well written children's book about djinn. The title page says it is book one, so there must be a series. I'll have to check the library.

And speaking of the library, we went to the main library as part of our summer school field trip yesterday. There was a program and free stuff for the kids. Next year I am going to get the library schedule earlier so we can plan to attend more of the library programs. They are free and maybe the kids will get their parents to take them to some of the activities after summer school is over.

After the kids finish the next round of literature circles, I think we will use our reading time to read the ten books in the book bags. We'll see if that works out.

Reading to Liam

I woke up this morning thinking about what I could read to Liam. He is two days old today. It's not too soon to start reading. There are so many great children's books available. He has a little bookshelf full of books. But there are even more at the library. And some at our house, the bookstore, online, on my nook. Oh, the possibilities! I can't decide where to start. We will just have a basketful and read them one after the other. This is going to be fun!