With Christmas and Hanukah just around the corner, consider holiday reading activities as part of your curriculum. After-reading activities are the most loosely defined activities, since they build on students prior knowledge and themed reading lessons. Students can do these activities in conjunction with the class reader or individualized reading about the holidays - the most important issue being they should be offered a choice of activities. This enables trust between teacher and student, and helps nurtures the skills of independent and deeper reading.
After-Reading Holiday Activities
1. Keeping a reading diary. Students make entries in their diaries connecting their feelings to the process of reading. Students write about the characters or setting or plot, sometimes related to a personal experience. For ESL reading classes, students may be encouraged to write in their mother tongue if they have not reached a comparable level of written proficiency.
2. Write the end of the story. The student is invited to write the end of the story. One creative idea: student produces a graph of 'good fortune' and 'bad fortune' for one of the central characters. This can be accompanied with explanations for the character's good or bad fortune.
3. Picture drawing. Students draw and/or collect pictures to illustrate scenes and/or characters. Students can also use recordings and accompaniment of music and other sound effects.
Class Reading Activities Using a Class Reader
A class reader is one particular reader chosen for the whole class to read for a certain length of time. Make sure the class reader is graded so that the text is understandable and the vocabulary is not too difficult.
Teaching Suggestions. It is useful for the teacher to read the first book aloud for all beginner or elementary school classes. It is not suggested the students read aloud for fear of being 'tested' on pronunciation or other inaccuracies.
Procedure for Working with the Class Reader
1. Elicit what the students know about the subject.
2. Go over cover art and title.
3. Use pictures for asking questions and writing new vocabulary. Cover the text with a paper mask and ask the class to talk about the pictures and note down new vocabulary while comparing their notes of the story to the verison of the text.
4. Another way to get into the text is to compare the text to student's knowledge of the text by watching a movie or play or anything else staged.
Over to You: What kinds of holiday reading activities have you used with your class? Feel free to experiment using the above activities or feel free to start a discussion of your own.
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