Teacher Discussion Forums

[danasity]

I'd like to create a library of High Interest/Low Level Readers for my middle school class. I've searched on many websites, but haven't been able to actually read the books for myself and sample them. Does anyone have a collection of readers that your students enjoy? This would be mainly for independent reading. I'd ultimately like to have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced library from which to choose.

thanks,
Dana

[Sally Olsen]

I bought subscriptions to magazines instead.

First I just bought out the airport magazines because you can take them on the airplane without charge as baggage. I don't know if weight or transportation is a problem for you.

Then I noted which magazines had been taken or thumbed through the most as I figured those were the ones that were the most popular. I also asked the students of course.

Then I subscribed to the popular magazines - fashion, motorbikes, hunting (in Greenland and Mongolia), boats (in Greenland) film stars and so on.

We were able to use the old magazines for making posters, illustrating stories and flash cards, etc.

The airlines have interesting magazines with current topics and they sent me enough copies for a class.

Comics were a great hit as well.

At the end we added their portfolios as they had to choose 12 areas of the textbook to write a story themselves. By the time it got to the reading corner the stories had been corrected and decorated especially by girls with scrap booking talents.

[eslweb]

I'm with Sally on this one... Students much prefer to read magazines rather than books... In fact when I brought a load of magazines into my class I found my students happily reading them during their lunch breaks.

I don't know the age of your class, but for teenagers and adults the girls love fashion and glamour magazines like Just 17 and Cleo etc. The boys enjoy the gaming, lads magazines (Be careful, some are a little vulgar) and gadgets... For a general audience movie and travel magazines are good.

Things like National geographic and Newsweek tend to be too difficult for all but the most advanced learners and I don't know why, but they really did not like Readers Digest...

James

[Senorita Daniels]

I've seen an activity in a book that uses political cartoons. They are about whatever is going on now, and have few words, so they're easier to understand. I haven't tried it yet, but I should.

[JeremyintheCzechRep]

Perhaps the right books might tempt them. Have you seen the Richmond series? The Teen Reader series? Or even my own e.books for download (check out the titles on my website).

Jeremy