LEVEL 1 STUDENTS CAN READ: ISABELA NOVELS

There have been recent comments that level 1 students can not and even should not read novels. But they can and they should.

We cannot just throw books at them. They need encouragement and modeling. They need some time and fun experiences with high frequency words.  And they need interesting and comprehensible books. But they can do it and when they do, magic happens, they begin to like it and they begin to pick up more than we could ever teach them.

Here is some recent evidence from Spanish I students, true newbies. They picked a book that they could understand and looked interesting to them and they read it. We do this all the time and we have an extensive classroom library. They do not fill out reports like this every day, but in this case, I wanted to check on how they were doing. The tool this time was a Dual Entry Journal Report, a medium level book report that is not too odious to students.

This is one student’s journal from the Karen Rowan book Isabela Captura un Congo.

This one is from Las Aventruas de Isabela, also by Karen Rowan.