Embedded Reading

Differentiation by Class

This year I have three Spanish 3 classes, each with its own size, needs and personality.  I am not really a stickler about having each class in EXACTLY the same place, but I do like them within a day or two of each other.    That isn’t always easy to do.  One class is significantly smaller and many of the students in the class are strong readers in English.  Anytime we read, they are off and running while I am prepping the other two classes for a successful activity.    Having several levels of one reading, and different levels of activities to accompany them has been wonderful.

This week we read a fictional story written in the past tense.   The base level reading was easy for all of the groups to comprehend, but one class had a much harder time answering questions in Spanish about the reading, so the next day we re-read it with actors and things went much more smoothly.  The other classes did not need to re-read, so in those classes we went on the next day to the second level of the reading.

On that day, the 3rd period class needed to go a bit more slowly than the ninth period class in order to thoroughly identify and understand the new details and language….and we had a fire drill…so we didn’t get as far as we did in period 9.

So, by day three I had three classes in three different places and I wanted to have a quiz before we started the state pre-assessments this week or it would be week 4 and I would only have 2 grades in the gradebook!    Here is what we did:

P. 3 quiz:  Students chose 10 sentences from the Level 3 reading (new to them) to translate to English.

P. 5 quiz:  Students read the Level 4 reading (new to them), answered 3 open-ended questions and wrote 2 sentences with new information that could be added to the story.

P. 9 quiz:  Students re-read Level 3 and answered 3 multiple-choice inference questions and 2 open -ended questions.

All of this was ready beforehand as activities to go with the reading levels.  I was able to choose which group was ready for which activities.

If I wanted to, I could continue on to Level 4 with all of the groups, but since it is early in the year, and we will be doing so much reading, I can stop right there in order to do next week’s state testing.   They will get many more opportunities to read and work through different kinds of questions and activities as the year goes on.  Remember, the MOST important pieces of language were in the base reading and have been repeated in every level, so I KNOW that each of the groups has had significant time with the focus structures in this story.
I’ll have the Level 4 version available for students to read on their own if they want to know how the story ends!!

Hope that your week goes well!!

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