Class-Created Readings – The Gift That Keeps on Giving, or How I Took a Teacher Spa Day

Today I was feeling a bit like taking a break from the aural input.  We have been doing a lot of work – a LOT – on the class’ skills to transition them into stories.  It is fun as all getout but intense work for everyone.  Today I thought, “Hey why not just read the collection of texts we have created so far this year?”  It was so touching to see the kids’ love of their characters, mostly created through One Word Images. They also liked seeing how much more complex the language that they are using has grown over the five weeks of the school year.

This video is of one of my Spanish One classes.  We spent the first few minutes organizing our writings – figuring out which ones in the pile were ours, what order they went in, and what dates we *think* they were created.  It was a nice review for them, a little break for us all from the hard work of learning to co-create together and be a respectful, focused community.  Also we got to talk numbers, ordinal and cardinal, as well as dates.  #thankyouci

This video shows Reading from the Back of the Room (one of Ben Slavic’s Reading Options) in French One.  I was impressed by the level of detail we got in the One Word Image of KFC, a gender-fluid chicken.  Their head and body are violet clair but their legs and feet are violet foncé.  And Chad the broken skateboard is polka dotted, and his dots were vert foncé whereas the board itself was vert clair.

This video is another Reading from the Back of the Room from Spanish One.  These kids are about to get out of school in four minutes and they are locked into the discussion.  If that is not a ringing endorsement of this work, I don’t know what is!!

This video (starting at 6:00 in) shows setting up Partner Reading AKA Volleyball Reading.