Reading activities

During the seminar this week, we talked about our reading experience and the teacher told us to draw a reading life on a map. Some of my partners read a lot since they were children but some of them don’t like reading so much or they just read comics when they were young and now they read short things like news, articles or magazines.

Reading is so important and not only in the academic context but in all the rest areas: they develop their imagination, understand other cultures, increase their general knowledge, to relax, to escape to someone else’s world… but what can we do as teachers to make children read?

There are many activities that we can do with the students in the library or in the classroom but they have to be adjusted to the age and level of the pupils. Here I give you some ideas to use with students to encourage reading:

-We can create a little library in the classroom. Each student has to bring his three favorites books and share them with the rest of the class so everybody can pick a book of one of his classmates loves. They should be change the collection of the books each trimester. The idea is that pupils choose a story according to their own likes.

-Meeting with authors. Pupils can establish a talk with an author about the book that they have been reading and ask him or her about the story or about his/her life as a writer.

-Storyteller time. An alternative to the typical storyteller is that the students of higher courses tell a story to the students of lower courses.

-Go on an excursion to an editorial to see the process of making books. Talk with the illustrators of the books and to the people who read books and who decide to publish them or not.

-Play role. Students should read a drama and perform it like in the theater. The objective with this activity is to teach the pupils to respect the comas and the different pauses during the reading in an entertaining way.

-Interactive activities. As we are working with TICS there are many activities that help to improve reading and writing and children can learn in a funny way. Here there is an example: http://www.genmagic.net/lengua3/alrev1.swf

This is just some ideas that we can use but there are many others so let’s blow up your imagination and create a new one. I hope you liked and it is useful for you.

2 thoughts on “Reading activities

  1. Hi Lidia! I decided commenting on your post because it is directly linked to the topic I have talked about this week in the blog.
    First of all and based on my experience, I would like to say that there is no doubt that reading is so important. I did not realised when I was at high school but nowadays I am completely sure of that. However, as I said in my post I am aware of some of the possible reasons of that. During the seminar time there were some of us who said that we hated reading when we were at high school. We only remember reading a huge amount of books, without any interest at all and writing a lot of summaries. It was completely senseless for us!
    For these reasons, I really like your ideas to encourage reading in students. I am completely sure that this is what we need nowadays to change the misconceptions that some students have about this activity. And I am totally against asking students to read books and books just because they have to read.
    They do not have the obligation to read. They have to understand that reading is fun and they can discover new worlds with just a book in their hands and enjoy themselves.

  2. Nice post and comment. Yes, there are many ways in which we can encourage reading, and the ones you mention will be fantastic once the student has overcome the first ‘level’. I would like you to think about elementary learners too because we need to think about our added element: it is done in an additional language. Imagine I’m learning Chinese, you may bring a Chinese author into my classroom, get a beautiful classroom library,etc. but I won’t understand what I am reading. That’s why you, future teachers, will help students by scaffolding their learning :)

Deja un comentario

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos necesarios están marcados *

Puedes usar las siguientes etiquetas y atributos HTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>