As language teachers we are always looking for fun and engaging ways to boost proficiency! I know that the most successful tool I have used in my own classroom has been incorporating reading spanish stories. One short reading passage or story can give us a week's worth of content that is engaging and memorable. How to find good spanish storiesThis is the trickiest part: we want to find something our students will completely understand without overloading them with too many new words. You want to look for stories with lots of cognates or stories that are action packed so that you can act them out or illustrate them while you read aloud. The goal is to make the story 100% comprehensible for students. Since I have a textbook curriculum that I have to use, I've found the easiest way to add in meaningful reading for my students is to write my own stories. This allows my students to feel good about themselves and their progress when they can understand everything they read. I really like the website The Spanish Experiment because they use stories students are already familiar with and illustrate them in Spanish. They write using authentic language too, which has it's plusses and minuses. It allows students to see real language in context, but there is some trade-off in comprehensibility with a higher volume of vocabulary. I found a good story! Now what?
In my classroom, we probably read 1-2 stories per unit, after the initial presentation of vocabulary. Using these readings has truly changed the way I teach and helped my students to significantly grow.
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