Reading Games

Reading Games

Activity Title: Cabbage Ball

Level: Any

Skill Focus: Reading/Speaking

Materials: paper

Procedures:

1.      Teacher will model by writing one question on a piece of paper and crinkling it up.

2.      They will then pass their paper to a student and ask them to write their own question, crinkle it around the first piece, and then pass it on to the next student.

3.      Repeat until all students have written a question and added it to the ball.

4.      During activity, students pass/throw the ball to each other, and each student then proceeds to take off a piece of paper and answer the question until they are all gone.

Activity Title: Running Dictation

Level: Secondary (can be modified easier or harder)

Skill Focus: Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening

Materials: paper, tape, stopwatch or watch with timer

Procedures:

1.      Before class, the teacher needs to write out multiple copies of a text. This can be a poem, a short passage from the book, a short fable, etc. The teacher should have one copy for each pair that they wish to have for the race.

2.      The teacher should tape the copies to the wall just before the activity starts so that students are not able to read them before the game begins.

3.      Students are to pair off. One student is the writer. They will be asked to sit on the opposite side of the room from their text that has been taped to the wall. They should have a writing utensil and a piece of paper for the dictation.

4.      The other student in the reader. Their job will be to run across the room, read the text, remember as much as possible, and run back to their partner to dictate the text.

5.      Halfway through the time (depending on how long the text is), the teacher will call out switch. The students will then switch jobs and continue to race until one pair is finished with the text.

6.      As an extra step, the teacher can ask teams to exchange their dictated texts with each other. They then have to use the original text to error correct the text of another team. The pair with the longest text with the fewest mistakes wins.