Turn Reluctant Readers into Bilingual Bookworms with Smile and Learn!
Have a book report coming up? Looking for a fun reading activity to do with your students? Or maybe you just want to find a nice book to curl up in a corner with and read to your students? Smile and Learn is here to make reading fun while improving your student’s literary knowledge!
Here are some ideas to spark a love of reading in your classroom:
- Story Time: Take time out of the day to read to your students. Diverting from tried and true classics like Huckleberry Finn and the Scarlet Letter shows young students reading can be fun. Reading Harry Potter or Captain Underpants might not feel like the most stimulating choice, but the most important thing is that you read something students can’t wait to keep reading when they get home.
- Character Art Extension Activity: Have students work on art of their favorite characters in between readings. Drawing the character, sculpting them out of clay, painting or watercoloring, or even writing short stories about the character are all great choices. Students already artistically inclined will be able to pursue their passion, and other students get the chance to become artists.
- Progressive Difficulty Story Collections: Fill a bookshelf with book series in chronological order. Many books increase in complexity and maturity as the series progresses, but some increase in reading level as well if you know where to look. Students hooked on a story will persevere through more difficult reading to find out what happens next.
- Reading Hierarchy: Tape a large sheet of paper onto a wall. On it, place a list of students ordered by how many books they’ve completed. You can use detachable name tags so students can move themselves up or down the hierarchy as they complete a book, or update the ladder yourself each week. You could even give the top students a reward of choice at the end of the week. You’ll inspire your students to compete and win prizes. This also demonstrates that reading has material value, just as it will in their adult lives.
- Pick Out Books with Students: Perhaps most important of all is that students choose their own reading material. Then, they can explore their own interests and have a book they want to read on their own. To both ensure students want to read and that they don’t default to a three-page comic book. We suggest turning picking a book into a group trip! Take them to the library or a bookstore and let your students bond with each other and with you while finding what they want to read.
- Smile and Learn’s Free Classic Adventurers Series: Check out our free Classic Adventurer reading series, available to all on our website! Choose from “Don Quixote,” “Lazarillo de Tormes,” and “Platero and I.” While your students read they can click on parts of the artwork to interact with the environment. Our reading content is available in listening, video, and reading formats! We have many more readings from articles of clothing to the biology of the great white shark on our platform. When your readers finish the story, there’s a matching reading comprehension quiz they can take to cement what they’ve learned.
From students who love to paint, to students who love to compete, to students who just want to sit and relax with their friends, we’ve covered ideas that appeal to them all. There’s a lot of room to move with this list. Bring your students in on the process, and spark a love of learning together!
Remove the physical hassle of keeping a large book collection, writing reading tests, or going out to get books by using the Smile and Learn app! With thousands of interactive readings and literature games available offline and six languages, your little learners will expand their vocabulary tenfold.
If you haven’t tried our educational platform yet, you can do so through the following link.
