In this short video, my Sp. 1 class is reading the “write and discuss” text from a conversation we did the day before on my wife’s fabulous cake she submitted for a cake contest. You can also watch that video on my channel feed. It was from the previous day, and it’s called “Show and Tell Sp. 1” or something.
Reading from the Back of the Room is a reading/textual review strategy that adds variety to the normal textual processing. I first learned about it in Ben’s Big Book of CI. In the activity, you just stand in the back of the room and ask questions about the text’s content. You can do this activity as the first activity to process a text, or a review after reading the text more traditionally by translation or in Spanish to clarify meaning. It just changes the format a bit. Rather than just translating or reading the Spanish, the students have to listen to a question and find the appropriate answer, in the appropriate wording. Plus, you could increase the difficulty level by jumping around in the text or changing the question format from more basic either/or, yes/no questions to more open-ended responses based on the student in question, or any other consideration. You could require whole class coral responses, take volunteers, or cold-call. I prefer cold-calling in this specific activity, to increase attention.
This was actually the first time I’ve used this processing strategy. I think it was largely successful. I definitely realized early on that I’d need to cold call, because some students just weren’t trying to focus.
ComprehensibleRVA 