10S NE1

 Today I had my students read three articles from USA Today about the Emilia-Romagna tennis tournament in Parma.  Last week Serena Williams won her first match in a very long time, but then lost the next day.  Those were the first two articles.  The third was about Coco Gauff who advanced to the quarter-finals.  What I do is take the reading and break it into sections.  Then everyone takes a turn reading their section aloud.  I give them time to read things before we start so they can sound out unfamiliar words.  Pronunciation is pretty good among all of the students in this class.  Once we were finished, I asked them to answer 3 questions about the content of the articles.  A fourth question was for them to each write a few words that are unfamiliar to them.  I was not surprised that "hiatus" was one of the unfamiliar words for nearly everyone.

It's hard to read newspaper articles.  There is so much implied information and assumed understanding that I take for granted.  After I had decided I was going to use newspaper articles as the learning tool, Robert and Susan both let me know these are the most difficult things for students to read.  We will continue with them, but I'm going to provide a lot more scaffolding to help with understanding.

Next week will be music news.  I have to find a reasonable article from a US newspaper.  Then I'll develop questions about the content.

Tomorrow is Buffy Day!  I learned from one student today that she has seen all of the series.  Although, it was about 10 years ago.  I asked her about the summary I wrote and she said it was very familiar to her.  We'll see how students handle it.