Reading for Children

Let's Make Reading Fun!

In this entry, another activity that will hopefully help you to mix up and add some variety to your students' reading activities while focusing on a particular area of their reading.

This activity is again, a very simple one, however, works very well for reading time in our school and one that students enjoy. Today's activity is called 'Sound Stop!'.

We use 'Sound Stop!' to help our students practice and focus on reading a particular double phonic when reading stories (for example 'sh' as in ship, 'ch' as in chicken, 'ea' as in seal etc.).
We use 'Fun Phonics Readers' as our readers for our elementary students and book 1 of Fun Phonics Readers has stories for each of the double phonics combinations from David Paul's 'Finding Out 1' text.

When reading a story for the purpose of practicing a certain phonic target, it's good to prepare students for the target. This can be done in many ways such as playing a game using the target phonic with students before reading. Additionally, the stories in Fun Phonics Readers containing double phonic targets emphasize the target by having it written at the top of the story, to make students aware of the target.

With 'Sound Stop!' students read by taking turns. When each student starts and stops reading is determined by the target phonic. When a student meets and reads a word containing the target phonic, they stop and the next student begins reading. This helps students to pay more attention to, and focus more on the target phonic. Students also enjoy the randomness of this activity. There may be situations where a student only reads a single word, as the first word that they meet and read may contain the target phonic. Equally the student may read a full sentence or more before they meet and read a word containing the target phonic.

To illustrate more clearly, if you refer to the picture below, whenever a student met and read the target phonic (circled in red for clear illustration. In this example, story 14 of Fun Phonics Readers book 1 contains the target 'sh' as in ship and 'ch' as in chicken) they stop reading and the next student starts.

Again, this is a very simple activity, but very effective and most importantly, an enjoyable one for our students.

I hope you find 'Sound Stop!' helpful and fun for your students.
Have fun reading,
Greg

Thanks for dropping by and welcome to my next post. In this post I'd like to tell you about a very simple game/activity (the simple ones are often the best) that we often incorporate into the reading component of classes at our school. This activity is called 'Reading Treasure Hunt'.

We like using Reading Treasure Hunt at our school for many reasons. Firstly, and very importantly, children seem to really enjoy this activity, which is something that we constantly focus on with our reading activities. It's a frequently requested favorite! Reading Treasure Hunt also benefits the children's reading in many ways. This activity is great, as it helps to improve the children's sight word recognition, phonics decoding skills and skim reading skills. Additionally, it's good for reinforcing vocabulary and practicing counting.

It's best to do Reading Treasure Hunt once students have completed reading a story in class. There are many different ways to go about Reading Treasure Hunt and I recommend playing around with it and finding what works best for you and your students. The basic idea of Reading Treasure Hunt is that the teacher selects either words or phrases from the story and the children race to find the words or phrases within the story. When they find the word/phrase, children raise their hands and tell the teacher what line number within the story the word/phrase is in.

Again, this is good for the children's sight word recognition, phonics decoding skills, skim reading skills, reinforcing vocabulary and practicing counting. As with any game/activity, the success of the activity will often depend on the teacher's enthusiasm for the game. Remember to be creative, show excitment and enthusiasm with your reading activities and the children will reciprocate.

You can see Reading Treasure Hunt in action by watching the video below.

I hope you find Reading Treasure Hunt helpful in your classes. Comments, feedback and questions are most welcome.

...And remember....have fun reading!
Greg

Thanks for dropping by my first post to ELT News. Over the coming months I will be posting games, activities and other ideas relating to children's reading. I hope you find these practical, informative and helpful. Please feel free to contribute with any questions, feedback or suggestions that you may have.

Last December I attended and presented at the Kansai ETJ Teaching Expo in Osaka. One question I was asked by quite a few teachers was "How can I use readers to most effectively benefit my students?". I believe one very effective method is to use readers that directly complement the course book students are studying from. Through doing this we can indirectly highlight connections within the language for students, help reinforce language, allow students to view the language in context and help students to absorb the language at a deeper level.

For the purpose of this post I’d like to illustrate how we use readers at our school, and how I personally believe readers can be most effective and beneficial to students.

Please take a moment to watch the video below, as I will refer to it from time to time in the rest of this post.

Reading is an integral part of our curriculum and we incorporate it into all weekly classes and students’ weekly homework. Let me first say that the readers we use at our school complement the course book that we use. The readers have been written in a way that each unit of the course book has a corresponding story in the respective reader, targeting the phonics, vocabulary or language structure from the given unit of the course book. This is a very effective way to use readers and allows us to incorporate our weekly story into our usual class plan. By this I mean whatever games, or activities (whether we are using conversation, writing or listening skills) we are planning to use to target the language in our course book unit of study, these activities automatically complement our stories also. Through this, we can then become more creative with how we approach our in-class reading by incorporating all kinds of activities into our reading.

If you watched the above video, you will have noticed how we drilled the phonic target -er (which was from the current unit in the course book), then our vocabulary targets for the unit (which are -er occupations). These kinds of activities can of course be done in the form of a drill, game or writing activity, as you would normally do in class. However, with the reader that we are using, because the phonics, vocabulary and language structures in each story directly complement the phonics, vocabulary and language structures in the course book, we can go one step further and also incorporate our stories and reading activity because they tie in directly with the study we are doing in class.

You will have also noticed how each of the students chose an occupation vocabulary card and placed it in front of them when we read the story together. As a student finished reading a passage from the story, they then nominated the next reader by using the target language structure from the current unit of study from the course book, ‘He / She’s a (boxer).’ By being creative with how we approach reading in class we can make reading a multi-dimensional activity where we include not only reading, but other elements of the 4 skills into reading. Again, through doing this we can indirectly highlight connections within the language for students, help reinforce language, allow students to view the language in context and help students to absorb the language at a deeper level.

Finally, we used the questions to students at the end of the story to incorporate conversation into the activity.

If you don’t currently have a reading program in you school, I highly recommend starting one. Reading benefits everyone. Furthermore, if there is a reader available that directly complements the course book you are using, I urge you to try it with your students.

Have fun reading!

Greg

• Sound Stop!
• Reading Treasure Hunt
• Readers that Complement Course Books

• Sound Stop!
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• Readers that Complement Course Books
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