Welcome to At the River News
April 2017
This month, I'll share a sequencing activity that you can use with At the River stories or any short beginner text. I saw this technique in action for the first time a few years ago in the video "Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers" (see link below). The teacher, Andrea Echelberger, used sequencing in various ways that increased interaction among students, gave students a chance to move around, and taught them about letter-sound correspondence, syntax, capitalization, and punctuation. I've been playing with this activity in connection with At the River ever since. If you haven't tried it, I encourage you to. It requires a few minutes of prep time to write and cut up the words, but it's worth it. Sequencing is one of the best things I've found for group work in multilevel classes at the ESL literacy level.
I've included photos. If you don't see them, click on "view this email in your browser." The word card strips are from the Dollar Tree.
Feel free to forward this newsletter. New subscribers: send me an email and I'll add you to the mailing list. You can find previous newsletters in the archives: http://www.emergentreaders.org/newsletter-archives.html. Remember that you can unsubscribe anytime.
I'm presenting a session on Scaffolded Reading at the NC State ESL Symposium in Raleigh, NC on May 20 at 2pm. Hope to see some of you there.
All the best to you and your students,
Shelley Hale Lee
Author, At the River and Other Stories for Adult Emergent Readers
attheriver@emergentreaders.org
www.emergentreaders.org
http://wayzgoosepress.com/shl.html
|
|
|
Benefits of Sequencing
After students are fairly comfortable listening to the reading, tracking with the text, and repeating sentences after you, try sequencing. Here are some skills they'll practice:
- listening
- connecting the sounds they hear with letters in the word
- recognizing common sight words
- learning about word order in English, capitalization, and punctuation
- working in groups
- speaking English with classmates
- working independently of the teacher
|
|
|
|
Great activity for multilevel classes
Here are a couple of ways to do it.
1. Divide the class in half. The first half will work on sequencing the story, with or without looking at the paper. Perhaps you can assign a strong student to lead the activity; he or she can read the sentences while the others arrange the words in a pocket chart or on the table. The second half will practice reading in pairs while you read with each individual student. Then switch the groups. This provides independent practice while you have the chance to listen to each one read.
2. Divide the story into four parts. Create four groups of students. Each group should have some higher level and some lower level students. Give each group a section to sequence. When they are finished, they read the section to you chorally or individually. Rotate the sections of the story so that each group has sequenced every section. Let each group decide whether or not to look at the story while they sequence it.
A possible pitfall: A student is impatient and grabs words out of other students' hands to make the activity go faster. Or, she simply does all of the work herself while the others watch. A solution is to give each student in the group an equal number of words to hold, and encourage the impatient one to wait so that everyone gets to practice.
|
|
|
|
Whole class activity, step 1, with the story "The River":
The teacher hands each student a roughly equal number of words. Give them a minute or two to look at the words and confer with classmates. The teacher reads the first sentence. Students step up to place the words in order. Teacher facilitates. Students may help or correct each other. At this stage, the teacher should not correct every capitalization or punctuation mistake, just make sure the words are in the right order. This picture shows the words in order, but with capitalization and punctuation errors.
|
|
|
|
Whole class activity, step 2:
Teacher and students do a choral reading. After each sentence, ask, "Is this a good sentence?" Wait for students to step up and correct errors themselves. If they don't see an error, point to it and ask, "Is this good?" Hopefully a student will correct it. If not, take out the word and hand it to someone to rearrange. As a last resort, the teacher can correct it him/herself. Finish up with a whole group choral reading. Or, invite individuals to read the story out loud for the group.
|
|
|
Sequencing as a group activity
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Groups sequence sections from the story "A Picnic." Here is a group in process with sentences #1-4.
|
|
|
|
#1-4 in correct order. Students are ready to practice reading.
|
|
|
|
Sentences #5-7 from "A Picnic."
|
|
|
|
Here are the words in random order for sentences #8-12.
|
|
|
|
Sentences #8-12 are looking good.
|
|
|
|
|
|
