Grade 7s Love to Read Out Loud!

I can see the value of reading buddies. My grade 7 class jumped at the chance to read some of the new picture books. When I had one of the boys read a book to me, I told him I would pretend to be the little kid, and he should read to me. What a great experience.

Then, for the rest of the class, the students took turns reading to me, the "little kid" and I would tell them if they're qualified to be a reading buddy.

The amount of expression and interest each one put forward was surprizing. The next step was to have them practice on each other to be good reading buddies.

This is definitely something I want to set up.

Ping!

We read Ping the other day. Me and the grade 1s. Ping is a baby duck, who once was pointing the "wrong way up" in the river when his master called them back onto the boat on the Yangtze River. Good cross-cultural thing going on here in this book.

So Ping got left behind... he didn't want to be the last duck up the ramp, 'cause he would get a SMACK! Long story short... Ping ends up on another boat and almost gets cooked for dinner, until a little boy decides he would rather his newfound friend go free...

The kids liked making the "smack!" sound when he finally returned home.

Then, we made little slide viewers so the kids could take it home and re-tell the story to their parents.