Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Kindergarten Day!

This year, I've decided to start reading to my kids once a week.  On Wednesdays, we have a shortened schedule, so I've set aside about 15 minutes per week to read to my kids.  I asked my neighbors if anyone was getting new carpet soon, and got a big chunk of carpet to put down for kids to sit on. 

The first week, I chose a very simple "I Can Read!"-type book about playing in the snow.  VERY little plot.  Afterwards, I apologized to the students and said that as their knowledge increases, the interest of the books will increase also.  Then, I read a harder book to them for a few minutes.  The students told me that they preferred the easier, boring book to the interesting difficult one!  I was amazed!  I thought that the books had to be interesting in order for them to pay attention, but NO!  They were just excited that they understood.

Since then, we've done several other books and, since I'm choosing books in French or English and then "writing" my own words, I can vary the difficulty depending on the level of the class.  For my French 1s, for example, we read Rainbow fish and we talked about the colors, swimming, sad, happy, etc, but for my French 4/5 class, I read the book as it was written to give them authentic input. 

It's working very well!  We've had a couple of crazy weeks, schedule wise, and my kids are asking where my rug is...they can't wait to get back to our routine.

I'm having a hard time picking the perfect books to go with each class, so I've been winging it.  I've created a "database" on my google drive to kind of help me remember what I was teaching them as I was reading the books.  If you use Kindergarten Day and would like to add to my list, please do!

Just click here and add anything you wish.  Just be careful because if you change it, it changes my copy too (and anyone else will be able to see it also).