Reflection 1

A topic in language education that I want to know more about is...

Something that I still want to know is how to involve students in reading. We already learned about think aloud, but this is only one strategy. The idea is to know different ways of getting students involved in texts.
I would like to find a new way of reading texts that could be more entertaining for them. Also, an important thing is to know other activities that we can do that are related to reading, but different from the common way.
The reason why I'm interesting in this area, is because children in the school where I'm doing teaching shadowing have to read in silence for 20 minutes every day, and today, children had to read a piece of a book, but I think that it was not so interesting because they just had to read it and answer some questions in pairs. I think that these two activities are not so motivating for them; they need to read, but a good way of doing it could be by different forms every day, not just read a certain amount of pages and answer some questions.

Here are two links that I found to improve the activities that we can do with our students in the area of reading:

http://www.everythingesl.net/inservices/wordless_books.php
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/skill-builder/problem-solving/48546.html

From these two pages on internet I could learn about different things:

• The first one is about wordless books, I really liked this strategy because it was totally new for me. The idea is that the teacher has to choose a book only with images, but the book has to be meaningful for the students. The purpose of those kinds of books is that children can create the story, they have to decide all together the names of the characters, the title, the theme, so they have to dictate to the teacher, and the teacher has to write the story. At the end, all the students have to read it. But this activity not only involve the students, but also parents, they have to participate because they have to type the text. All the details are on the website. I think that this is a very good activity to encourage students not only to read, but also be able to create a story, I believe that is more interesting for them to read something that they have created so they can feel part of it.
  

• The second website is about think aloud and read aloud, we already learned about these strategies, but I really liked this page because it shows how to do it, the things that we can say to catch the attention of the students, and how to use it in different subjects. Also this page shows that you can use this method in pair work, so the idea is that students can think out loud and share their own opinions, predictions or ideas.
  This strategy can be used not only to read, but also teachers that teach other subjects can use it as well. For example in maths to make predictions, in difficult tasks in social studies you can make the students that say what they are thinking. This strategy is very helpful and encourage your students to say aloud what things they have in mind.
  

These new strategies are very useful for me becasue they explain different ways of involving students in the process of reading. Reading is an important area of learning a new language, through reading students can learn new vocabulary, also can acquire new forms of grammar, and of course, children that are used to read are more creative and have higher IQ.