Recently I’ve been very impressed by the Macmillan Language House stuff, they got a great new readers series ( Springboard) that gets rave reviews, so I finally got the chance today to pop across to their office and see what they have.

Now usually I don’t really recommend reading activities, because it takes so long, isn’t in the official guidelines and you really have to get the kids speaking first; if they can read but can’t speak it’s not that useful! But there is a huge boom at the moment in getting kids to do extensive reading, where they just read and read loads of books. So any boom that does get kids wanting to read has to be a cool thing.

Anyway, I was chatting away and the thing with these books is that they sell the books but the audio is given away free as mp3 files. Now that makes a huge difference, basically you can download the mp3s and play them in the class. You make the audio the central part ( and it is fun!). But of course the kid will get bored with just audio, so they need something visual to look at. But as these readers don’t have have CDs attached, you could feasibly buy a class set, one for each kid ( or even one between two) and just do it for a 5 minute “break” in a normal lesson. The kids listen and can follow through with the cool pictures, or the ones who want to can indeed follow the words. That is a cool way to get the kids extra exposure, but it’s short enough to leave plenty of time for talking work. As I was thinking about this, it hit me that these could be a brilliant thing to do with the ungenki 5th and 6th graders. Why? Because these readers aren’t just stories but are linked in with other subjects, like the environment etc. etc. now this is just what we are supposed to promote in 5th and 6th grade. So you hit all the targets, you include English listening, other subjects and as it’s not too genki even the quietest 6th grade class should get something out of it. Cool, right, let’s get this tried out!

Then out again for a few, but not too many, beers!