11th of September 2015 - Understanding the story

This English lesson was about understanding the chosen story. And the ones who were finished could start reading the text along with the audio book. To enable this, I searched the Internet for some affordable mp3 players I could have in the classroom. So let's welcome these new family members...

I have to say, they are NOT GOOD. Terribly complicated to handle... I'm not sure I would buy them again but now I got them in the classroom and they will do their job.

So again at the beginning of the lesson I did the good morning conversation with the class. Then I told them what today's aim was and showed them how I wanted them to do it by demonstrating it on the OHP. I copied one page of the "Rainbow Serpent" onto a transparency and read through the beginning of the text loudly highlighting words I thought they might not understand. I was kind of talking to myself just if I was one of them.

So the steps they were supposed to take were:

• Read the text and highlight every word they don't understand
• Search for those classmates who had the same text
• Talk with them about the words they don't understand. Maybe another one from the group understands the word. 
• Then for all the unknown words left I prepared dictionaries for them to search. 
• Once they really understood the whole text, they could come to me and get a MP3 player I set up with their text so they could read along.

Most of them understood pretty much all of the text since it's really, really easy. So not too much later, they came to grab a MP3-player. I had put folders in the player with each story so they could just repeat the folder and hear only their own story. Since I only have 10 players, some kids had to share one but since there were always more than one in a group, that wasn't a problem. One didn't have battery and one just didn't work so I gave my mobile phone to one kid and let another one listen to the text on my computer.

They really did a great job. They listened and read very concentrated and I really think that they had fun doing it. Two even came after the lesson and told me that we should do the readings like this in German as well.

From now on I'll set up my old phone, my tablet and my old iPod with these audio books so I have as many in school as possible... Maybe I can let them go to the computer room as well. I'll have to check if it's available.

But I do think that this lesson was a success. They were all working individually in their own speed and I really think they had fun :-)