Two tools to make using news articles in the classroom a bit easier
At the Bank of England Teacher Conference this I gave a talk on improving economic writing. I’ve got a much more detailed blog post coming with the full content of that presentation as I know quite a few people couldn’t make it on the day due to the weather. Even though the talk was on writing, we talked a bit about reading and I promised extra info on two tools. The first, I flagged in the talk itself; the other came up while I was chatting to a couple of people afterwards.
A couple of years of the Class Read: what I've learned
[Admission: I actually wrote most of this a year ago and never got around to posting it.] A few years ago I wrote about an experiment I was just starting: getting a whole class to read the same non-fiction book together, a "Class Read". You can find that original post here, and it lays out where I started and why. I'm pleased to say the experiment stuck. This is also one of my Classroom Systems; you can take a look at the others here. I've packaged up all the resources that I
Free Choice Read
A not-perfect but fairly easy-to-implement system for regular reading. We really want my students to be reading, and ideally reading non-narrative non-fiction that builds up their contextual knowledge. So, what I was after was a system that gets students reading the right sort of stuff, at a level that's accessible to them, in a way that doesn't eat up a bunch of teacher time. I just posted about Class Read and I still love that system, but there are a few barriers to settin