After the joyful experience of my fist read-aloud with my 7th grade class, and the awesome request by a student to “read more stories”, I decided that I should let my students choose our next book.
I created two short (cheesy and amateur) book trailers, which I am sharing here with permissions from the authors:
“Superhamburgers” by Mike Peto
“La France en danger” by Mira Canion
After watching the book trailer, I let the students read the first two pages of each book on their own. This allowed them to assess the difficulty of each text.
Finally, using a simple google form, students took a vote based on interest and difficulty.
“La France en danger” won and we are now reading it together as another read-aloud!
[The whole process took roughly 15-20 min.]
Vote results projected live for my students to see
What do you do to encourage student choice in reading for Novice learners?
I would love to hear your ideas.
Oh my gosh, I love the idea of having their votes be projected live. What an exciting moment that must have been. Thank you so much for sharing!
I love this idea! I’m curious about where you find the fun stories to read? I need to find material that’s enjoyable for my seventh and eighth graders (and me!) to make this effective.
Hi Rachel, https://fluencymatters.com/ has great comprehension-based readers, as well as TPRS books and other independent writers/publishers. Are you in CI/TPRS for French teaches on FB, we talk about books on a regular basis 🙂
[…] Guided self-selected reading is when you go to the library with your students and help them choose a “real” book. You might sit next to them and read the book with them to see if it is right for them (and also to get them started!). Cécile Lainé wrote another great blog post about reaching this stage: Toward self selected reading. […]
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