Monday, November 24, 2008

Non-Fiction Reading for the Younger Students

I have been unable to link to one of my favorite blogs lately and I have once again found his blog - not quite figuring out yet why he is not appearing on my RSS Feeds. I will figure that out in time, but tonight I had a chance to read of some of his latest posts that I had missed. He never disappoints me in finding good websites that work well with students who may be using English as a second language or just need some extra help with reading and writing. His name is Larry Ferlazzo and he is a leader in the field of ESL.
What I found interesting on his site tonight is something that is a part of the Scholastic Network and I had not noticed how its content had grown. Larry posted it like this:

Scholastic has been publishing excellent “Listen and Read” nonfiction stories (with audio support for the text) for several years on their website. They’re accessible to Beginning English Language Learners. It’s not easy to find expository text that’s accessible to Beginning ELL’s.

The problem has been that each story hasn’t had a permanent url address — they’ve kept changing it as they’ve published the stories in their monthly online newsletters. It’s been pretty frustrating.

However, now they’ve compiled permanent links to all of them on one page. Explore all fifty of them now at Listen and Read.

I think Listen and Read will allow your students to have much practice using non-fiction material, hearing it in order to promote understanding.

I am in Toronto, CA tonight after presenting in my home town of Cleveland today. We got to the airport and waited for a delayed plane, then puddle-jumped in a prop plane over Lake Erie. I felt like I could have made it faster by swimming across. Tomorrow ends the week and although my participants will not be looking forward to Thanksgiving here in Canada, BER is off for the rest of the week. I look forward to Thanksgiving with friends and a weekend hop to Vegas. What could be bad?

I hope that all of you will be surrounded with family and good friends and enjoy this wonderful day of too much food and football! Enjoy!

1 comment:

Larry Ferlazzo said...

Thanks for the kind words.

Sorry your RSS Reader has not been picking up the feed from my blog. Bloglines has always had some problems with Edublogs, the host for my blog. But maybe you're using a different Reader.

You might want to consider unsubscribing and than subscribing again. Or use the "subscribe by email" option.

Larry