Category Archives: Reading activities

Level: Vary widely, Intermediate to well above

Circumstances: Students in secondary school, doing 6 hours English a week, with an extensive (though under-used) library of "graded readers"

Classroom time required: None; students do task as homework

Brief outline: Students are required to read a minimum 3 graded readers per term as homework. Once they have read a book, they will post their review on the class blog. Reviews to include title, author, brief plot outline, whether or not they liked it and why (not), links to 2-3 related websites, and an illustration.

Equipment required: None. All children have an Internet connection at home (with PCs also available to them at school).

To find out more about blogs and blogging:
This article on TeachingEnglish.org.uk gives a brief introduction, and you will find more posts on blogging here.

See also the "Quick Tour" at Blogger.com.

Example 5 isn't a blog either — again it's an idea for a blog, one that comes from my daughter, who is responsible for the illustration below:

In schools here in Spain, they get kids to write what they call "fichas" for the books they read — name, author, plot summary, whether or not they would recommend it, etc (as you can see above).

In English language classes, graded readers (abridged, and with limited vocabulary) are used quite extensively, with some schools having class libraries of them.

My idea would be that each student in the class would read several graded readers, and post their "fichas" on a single class blog, which other students could then comment on.

Questions as before…