DEALING WITH BOOKS - 3rd July

After all the excitement from previous days, today we gathered at NILE again for some lessons on Reading skills development.

We started our first lesson with Jo in a different classroom from the one we were already used to. She had prepared some task for us to lead us into the topic: speaking about books.

 

The first, introductory task was intended to set us in the track of thinking about tiltles and authors, though every book had a pun on it. Following this track, the second task was a harder matching-type activity. In both cases, the hidden jokes got us into doing the task to fin out the punchlines. We did these task willingly knowing that our efforts would be rewarded with laughter.

We also had to write the titles and author of three books that somehow we could remember, either because we liked or disliked them, or perhaps because those were the first or the last books we read, or maybe because they were the most expensive books we bought or they were given to us and we had to read them as a predicament. By the way this was our thrid task. We had to do it in order to move on to the fourth task: talking about books.

On the fourth task we were given a tag with a basic question inquiring information from a book. We had to expand that tag question by adding two more questions around the information the tag question demanded. This was the final task and we had to stand up and walk around the class with the main aim of asking our partners. Standing up helped us to focus on the task of getting answers intsead of wandering ramdomly.

After the break Malgosia was waiting for us in our regular class with a wide selection of books for children. She even read to us some of her favourites during this and the following lesson after lunch. Though se didn't actually propose any book-related task, we were able to take into account several considerations on dealing with children's books.

First of all we noted the difference between real books for children and graded-readers books. Each have their own way on involving the kids into language learning. But for the moment we were going to focus on the first ones, in order to break down the asumption most kids have that to understand a text they must already know every single word on it intead of conveying the meaning from the context.

We should also consider the inclusion of ICT's in class while carrying out reading tasks. Computers and smartboards can help us to display the illustrations of children books at a larger scale and draw the attention of the kids towards the scene they depict. 

Before reading the book we could guide the kids on extracting information about the book from the cover or backside of the book as well as the initial pages. Information about the author or the plot of the story can be guessed in order to encourage them into reading.

While reading the book special attention should be payed on pronunciationand rhythm. We must ensure that the kids are all able to follow our reading and understanding the story. Higlighting the most repetitive arts of the story over a melody to help our audience retain it or simply singing those parts will contribute to associate certain words to movements taht have to do with their meaning. Analysing the illustrations of the book with the kids will help them to understand certain aspects of the plot or even the meaning of some words.

After reading we can also ask comprehensive question to check how well they're doing and get those distracted learners back to the task. Question may range from what has already happened or what would happen next, though this can also be done on the go as we are reading aloud. Questions can also target the grammar aspects of the text or aim towards the moral of the story.

To wrap up the topic of the day, some of us proposed new approaches to encourage kids into reading. Rafa suggested an example of his own with a book character named Flat Stanley. In this case pictures are made starring a cut out illustration of the main character on different landscapes. This way not only the character lives on the books but it also becaomes alive into the real world, sharing some experiences with the kids. Creating an emotional bond towards a fictional character it another way to trigger an interest into reading.

Above all, today was quite a relaxed day with lots of thinking to do. The majority of this strategies are ready to be used and do not demand a too much effort on the teacher's side. It was a nice day.