“Recreational reading is the most powerful tool we have in language education”
-Stephen Krashen, presentation at CCFLT, February 2017
These are the readings we need most for our classes, the easy easy readings that low level readers can read independently. Almost impossible to find. This is how you do it:
At this point we have over 20 submissions in our collaborative, downloadable FVR cartoon library.
A few of the cartoons have been fully illustrated in color and are ready to be laminated or added to a cartoon binder for easy reading by students during their free reading part of the class.
Some of the cartoons have been illustrated with pencil so that it will not be costly to print out the cartoons. If you have your students illustrate either colored or pencil versions and they turn out well, please send us the best example so that we can offer both colored and black & white versions.
Most of the cartoons also have a non-illustrated version. These are great for substitute plans or a homework assignment where you want to lightly assess student´s reading comprehension. Instead of printing off a class set of one cartoon, please consider printing off 5 or 10 different cartoons and having students illustrate a random cartoon. Send in the best.
I like to emphasize that the act of illustrating is not an efficient use of class time; assign these as substitute plans or occasional homework to supplement the CI students are hearing in class. The real value of the cartoon library will be once we have a full reading library to cater to the needs of the lowest level readers in class so that your FVR program will be strong and effective.
If you would like to join our collaborative effort please read the instructions and submit a class-created cartoon. All languages are welcome.
In my opinion, this has lots of potential.
Lots of people continue to ask me about the free downloadable FVR start-up kit that I created back in 2014. I posted two short novels that my classes had co-written, formatted so that anyone could print and add them to their own class library. The project did not attract the collaboration that I had hoped – who has time to co-write entire novels with their classes?! I temporarily closed the website until I could create an easier collaborative project from which busy teachers could realistically benefit. Today I would like to invite you to imagine again the possibilities of this wonderful, much reduced but much more realistic project.
Instead of novels we are focused on two page cartoon versions of class-created stories. If you are imagining stories with your classes, come take advantage of the creativity of other classrooms around the world and stock up your FVR library!
I predict that this will be great for new teachers lacking resources. This will be great for experienced teachers who are looking for comprehensible, independent reading for their level 1 classes. This will be great for teachers of lesser taught languages who do not have many choices to stock their FVR library. When this really takes off the online FVR library will be a wormhole into classrooms that do not yet appreciate the effectiveness of storytelling methods.
Currently there are already about a dozen cartoons available. To get access to our growing collection, I merely ask that you ask an original story with your classes, write it down with them and then simplify it further to fit onto one of our blank cartoon templates that we provide. You do not even have to illustrate it (although inside the cartoon index we provide both non-illustrated and illustrated versions—the non-illustrated versions are great for substitute plans).
See the details at: https://fvrclasslibrary.wordpress.com/
