::A Geek in Korea::

In my lowest level class of “just barely qualify as readers”, we are reading a storybook once a week. This is a time for intensive review, pronunciation improvement, and basic handwriting. The students have tapes, storybooks, and workbooks, and their general task is to drill, drill, drill until the story is burned into their brains. I must facilitate this by making the material as interesting as possible despite the fact that they’ve seen and read it 50 or more times already.  This isn’t very easy to do.

My method of presenting familiar material in a different and engaging manner today involved a white board and several different colored markers. I wrote a sentence on the board randomly in each of the three different colors. The students had to recreate the sentences in their notebooks correctly.

I started with one sentence, then when most of the students had figured out what I had written, I added the second sentence in a second color. This way the slow students could keep working, and the faster students could get a second challenge. I saved the third sentence, the most difficult, for anyone that finished the second challenge.

At the end of the time, everyone had the second challenge finished, and the third challenge was being decoded as the bell rang. Had I gotten the students through the third sentence, I had a slew of words written on the board, ripe for a reading exercise as I erased them one by one.

The students had a lot of fun with this exercise. The divide between students that had studied to the point of memorization and those that only did minimal work was stark. I think I’ll do this once a storybook from now on.