WHY TO CREATE A LIBRARY IN THE CLASSROOM?

All literature, and literacy, is born from the human need to tell stories, to tell stories about one self or about others, to tell stories about the world to better understand our existence, the others and the universe we live in. All the stories, the myths, the fables and the novels, including those addressed to children are, in fact, the result of this wish and this basic need: they help us to live, to survive; they help children to grow up and develop.

I honestly believe that create a library in the classroom is a great idea to encourage children to read books, but we have to be careful because children in Primary Education are in a critical age in which they might love reading book or they might hate it. That is why I am going to share some ideas of how to create a library in the classroom. At the beginning of the course, we should collect a small amount of money (1 or 2 Euros) from the parents or ask them to bring a few English books appropriate for the age.

In the classroom we have to create an adequate space for the library where the children feel comfortable and relax while choosing a book or reading. It is easy for instance, we can cover some boxes with colourful papers to differentiate the classification of the books and place them in a corner on the floor level as the children can reach the books without the help of an adult. Then we should put some blankets and cushions in the corner around the boxes with the books, in this way the children feel as being in a different space of the classroom where instead of sitting in a chair you are sitting on a cushion on the floor and it should be decorated as the special place it is, with images of fairy tales, cultural things, daily situations, etc. All this is focused on how motivate children to read because without their motivation we cannot help them to read, first somehow we need to motivate them to read anything that they are interested in and once we can see they already enjoy with the reading, then it is time to guide them through some adequate books but always suggesting and never enforcing.

Reading strategies

In this post, I am going to focus on some reading strategies that can help us in a CLIL lesson. I just choose some of the strategies, actually I pick those ones that I think that are easier to implement in a lesson with English as a second language. All these strategies are using scaffolding technics as activate pre-knowledge, schemata, discourse frames, contextualizing or think-pair-share.

 

 

Question Chart: Improving Reading Comprehension through Questioning

This strategy consists of asking questions the children about a book but just giving little clues, like showing the cover, telling some attributes about the main character or reading a few pages of the book. The questions can be formulated by the teacher or the students, by wondering what is going to happen next. Once they find the answer in the book, they have to reason the answer with the support of the book.

In this process the pupils have to make predictions, activating their own schema with their previous knowledge/experiences.

We can give discourse frames to facilitate the questions for example why, what, when, where, who and how.

 

 

Story Bits: Retelling Stories to Build Strategies in Real Reading and Real Writing

Here the students have to guess what is the story about just looking at the cover. This is a warm up to activate their schema. After that, the teacher reads the whole story, so it is time to start with the activities.

First activity is a brainstorm in pairs about what happened in the story following this order; beginning, middle and end.

In the second activity every student has to re-write the story in one page. As there is not enough room in one page they should summarize it.

Finally the students share the story with the rest of the classroom.

VIDEO

 

Interactive Story Retelling: Encouraging Retelling with Picture Supports

We can this strategy to encourage the children to retell the story with pictures supports. The firs step is to involve all the students in the story. It is easy if we give a picture of any character of the story to each pupil, so when I am telling the story and a new character appears, the student with the picture sticks it on the blackboard. Now the students can re-tell the story with the help of all the visuals we have been using (pictures).

Finally we give all the pictures used in the story to each student so they can use it to re-tell the story to a classmate or even at home.

 

Engaging in Reading

We need to choose an already known story for the kids and after re-telling to them, ask questions about what happened at the beginning of the story, in the middle and to the end.

Once we have refreshed the story, the students have to choose their favourite part of the story and draw a picture, as next day they will have to write a little story about what is happening in their picture and share with the rest.

 

Building Reading Comprehension: Five Senses Story Reading

This strategy consist of using the five senses to activate and connect the previous knowledge of the students with the story. The pupils have to predict was going to happen in the next page, but this prediction is made through the senses as we should ask the pupils questions related to both, the story and the senses. For example, you make a noise related to the story and ask, what is that noise?

 

Sentence Starters: Making Text-to-Self Connections

When we support the students with these sentence starters (reminds me of, etc.), we are helping them to activate the schema of their previous knowledge and experiences which help them to understand the story better. It is very important to have into account that the schema is different in everyone.