Originally posted on Erika Osváth’s blog, and re-posted here with her permission, this article explores free reading materials and activities for children.
By Erika Osváth.
It all started with my obsession of Oxfam second-hand bookshops, especially the one in Oxford, where I’ve been twice – I mean both to Oxford and to this bookshop – and both ventures had brought some great successes.
My first noteworthy acquisition was the book called Hey World, Here I Am! by Jean Little, OUP and this wonderful collection of poems has been a big hit with my (pre)-teen classes ever since. See here an example lesson plan I wrote around one of the poems.
This summer’s visit to the same bookshop led to further accomplishments. Books that may very well be in the “nothing special” or “so, what” category for my native-speaker colleagues, especially for those, who have kids, but new and exciting to me and my kids. These are books from the Oxford Reading Tree Series, stories that have everything a good story needs for this age-group, ie 4-10, offering:
- value for the kids, they can relate to the content easily
- fun
- opportunities to interact with the story-line, the characters
- repetition of some useful chunks
- authentic language
- visual support, enough to be able to work out meaning from visuals
- avoidance of story-line led purely by language – ie built around certain grammatical structures or vocabulary
- somewhat graded language for them to be able to analyse language and work out the meaning of some of the sentences, chunks or words
- freedom to read and listen at the same time, doing this as many times they want (they control the pace of listening too)
- plenty of opportunity to notice pronunciation features
- great stories to read in general
and soooo really help kids in the process of appreciating reading in English, with this providing excellent opportunities for natural language acquisition.
Anyway, further proof for how great these stories are is the reaction of my kids, who keep reading the printed ones I had bought in Oxford again and again,
- first just by going through the pictures and telling me all about it, how funny it was and some of the characters they thought could be drawn with a bit more care.
- Then next day they picked them up again, read them silently on their own, looking at the pages more carefully, possibly trying to make sense of the sentences together with the pictures.
- And then for the third time, they asked me if I wanted to listen to them read out-loud. Now that made me a proud parent-teacher.
Seeing their enthusiasm I went onto the website recommended at the end of these books to find an amazing collection of free eBooks for different age-groups. Oh my oh my! Not only there were zillions of great stories, but they also had interactive activities that accompanied them. True, with some of these I did need to turn into a teacher-mummy, but the thing is that they would not come off it. They just read and listened story after story and did the games, which they found a lot of fun.
So here’s how you can access them easily:
I really wish these books were explicitly made available for EFL teachers and learners too and we could make full use of them, not only if someone happens to stumble upon them.
Anyhow, I did become extremely excited about it and decided to share it with you. There are so many things you can do with these free eBooks in the primary EFL classroom! I should certainly do a workshop on it soon, though I’m pretty sure you would have loads of ideas too. Have fun using them!
