Read Dating - and other ideas from the Reading Toolbox

This post is a follow up to my post on my students' first real responses to untextbooking. In this post, I want to talk about an activity that was not a huge hit last year, Read Dating, and how it has become much more effective this year. I'm also going to link to and briefly discuss some other great reading activities that I use.

Read Dating

I did this activity last year with minimal success. My 4% students felt like we were moving to slowly while my barometer students felt like they were dragging the class down. At the end of the year this was the one activity that they wanted to change. I took their feedback and made some changes:

• I lengthened the amount of time with each partner
• On certain days we'll have an activity that accompanies the reading. So far we've done comic strips, summaries, and comprehension questions. 

The students have responded well to the changes, but I find that if I do this as a warm up or review, they are able to move more quickly and enjoy it more, even if I do it exactly as I had done last year. Here's the basic procedure:

1. Give students a reading that you've read before, gone over, etc.
2. Pair students up. I tend to do this sitting in chairs, but I've seen it done standing in rows or a circle. I tried this with one class and, while they enjoyed it, it was harder for me to move through and listen in. I will probably alternate between these two ways of doing it. 
3. Students are given a set amount of time. I have given up to 5 minutes, if the story is longer or newer, and as little as 2 minutes, if it is a short story, or one we've done over and over. 
4. Student A reads the first sentence in the target language. Student B translates.
5. Student B reads the next sentence. Student A translates. and so it continues.
6. At the end of the specified time, I call to them to "movete" or move. They rotate to a new partner. 
7. When they are with the new partner, they start as far back in the story as possible. If student A got through the 6th sentence, but his new partner only got through the 3rd, they start with the 3rd sentence. This ensures that everyone reads the story in its entirety. 
8. If they finish the story, they start over.  

After they do this reading, I'll often ask comprehension questions in Latin or we'll do a timed write. Here's another take on this activity from Keith Toda.

Cloze Reading

I used to hate these. I disliked them as a student because they were often done in English and the English wasn't what I had trouble remembering, it was the vocabulary in the target language. I often use these, however, as a teacher, to wrap up a story or review prior to a test. I don't do the cloze passage in English, but in Latin. 

A cloze activity for a Latin III class

I do cloze readings in all my classes, but they vary based on level. Levels I and II only have blanks based on vocabulary and this is often done in a presentation style. They'll write down the sentences and fill in the blanks and we'll discuss together. 

For my upper levels, however, since we are going over explicit grammar at this stage, I have started giving the cloze passages like the one to the left. All the blanks are based on key vocabulary, but some focus on the grammar we are learning/reviewing (in this case verbs). You can leave clues in (parentheses) to guide students towards the grammar points you've been working on. 

The students seem to find this activity useful, especially if we take time to discuss the blanks and, if fitting, the grammar involved. I want to specify, however, that I only use grammar blanks with my upper level students. They are ready for these kids of questions. Lower level students are often not ready and these kinds of blanks cause a lot of stress and do not increase acquisition. 

Read and Discuss/Read, Discuss, and Draw

This is often the activity I use for an initial reading. It can be done a variety of ways, but it essentially boils down to the following:

1. project the story, or give out copies
2. do a choral reading of each paragraph, or read popcorn style, or the teacher reads.
3. pause for vocabulary questions in the target language
4. circle new vocabulary
5. ask comprehension questions in the target language
6. Optional: ask students to draw a single picture for that part of the story

You can include choral translation if you wish, or you can keep it in the target language. I usually keep it in the target language, but will ask for a quick translation if I want to review a particularly difficult word or construction. At the end of this, we usually complete a timed write, but I may delay this if I feel like we need to go over it some more with another activity the next day. If you choose to ask your students to draw a picture, you can allow them to use those pictures to guide their timed write. 

Picture Timeline

This is an activity that I've been doing for a few years, but I don't know that I've ever written it up. I will do this after an initial reading of a text and use it to retell the story. I take a story we're reading and cut it into pieces. Students get in groups and draw a single picture for their part. Then, we put them on the board and discuss. I'll circle vocabulary, ask comprehension questions, etc. until I'm sure the entire class is clear on each picture. Then, I'll give the class one minute to send a representative up to the board and to direct him/her into reordering the pictures correctly. They can only speak Latin. This is a good warm up activity or closing activity after an initial reading. 

Reader's Theatre

You can read my initial write up of this activity here, but I did want to update you guys' on my thoughts. This year, reader's theatre is going much more smoothly. Since we stopped relying on the textbook and we are using myths and histories and Classical and Medieval texts, along with student and teacher generated stories, rather than textbook stories, we have a lot more opportunities for reader's theatre and the kids really enjoy it. I will do reader's theatre as a follow up activity and we often do it as a final reading. I choose volunteer students who don't mind being silly and will commit to the roles. 

Parallel Universe

I started using this activity after reading Keith Toda's blog post on it. I first used it as a review for a class that had done poorly on a test. It was our final review before the class retook the test. The class average went from a 78% to a 97%. Since then, we've been using parallel universes as one of a few final ways of reading stories before tests. Sometimes, it is a quick review, as Keith suggests, and listen to students as an oral informal assessment. Other times, I will ask them to correct the mistakes and turn it in as a written formal assessment. With some of the upper classes, I've even expanded it to include a timed write afterwards, but I ask students to take one of the sentences from the parallel universe and rewrite the story based upon that single fact. Overall, students really enjoy this. Sometimes my changes make the story funny while other times the changes are so glaring that they don't make any sense. I try to vary the difficult of the change to see just how comfortable students are with the story. For example, using Mary Had a Little Lamb, you might make three levels of difficulty in changes. While the first includes major changes, that are easy to spot, the second changes a detail that students will likely remember, but is a smaller change, while the third may be even more difficult, or be a much smaller change. 

1. level 1 - Mary had a huge lamb, it's fleece was dark as the night.
2. level 2 - Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was white as teeth. 
3. level 3 - Mary had a little lamb, it's tail was white as snow. 

I really would like my reading toolbox to be bigger, so I'd love to add to this list. If you have any activities that you do, let us know!