User Experience
What users like about the materials:
- Comprehensible input, repetition, and simple language use are integrated into all materials.
- Practice activities involve listening, speaking, and reading skills.
- Materials are truly novice level, providing authentic reading practice for early language learners.
- The topics chosen for the books, make them easy to connect to pre-existing units.
- Visuals are engaging and fun.
- Materials can be used both in groups and with individual students.
- The website makes the online resources easy to access and use.
- The audio is helpful. It allows all learners to read at their own speed.
These materials can be used with:
- Kindergarten to college level students
- Heritage and non-heritage students
- Full-class, small group, and individual teaching/learning
Additional activity ideas:
- Provide writing prompts so that students can create their own stories using vocabulary and structures from books.
- Allow students to write an alternative ending to the stories.
- Have students act out scenes from the stories.
- Using text from the stories, create sentence strips, and ask students to put the sentences in order.
- When introducing students to new verbs, ask them to write their own sentences using those verbs and then share them with the class.
- With the writing exercises on the worksheets, scaffold the learning by asking students to write more or less based on their abilities.
- Cooking fun: When reading Zeek in the Kitchen, provide students with pictures of all the steps to make the rice pudding, and ask them to arrange them in the order of the recipe. Once they complete this, they can talk in small groups about all of the steps necessary to complete the recipe or film a short video of themselves explaining or even making the recipe. Students can also do this with a different recipe of their choosing!
Do you have feedback after using the materials? Share with us what you liked, what suggestions you have for improvements, and/or additional ways you have found to integrate these materials into your classroom.