Blog Post #4

1st Graders Create Their Own Read-Along Audiobook
On the Langwitches Blog, on the Blog post tilted 1st Graders Create Their Own Read-Along Audiobook; the teacher described how she made an audiobook with her 6 and 7 year old students. I thought this was an amazing idea. Not only is this getting the students to enjoy reading, but those that are having trouble will be able to have a little help through the audiobook. The teacher mentions that she took each student outside the classroom to record their part of the audiobook. I think that this is also beneficial to those students who are having trouble with reading. These students are having one on one time with the teacher, while another teacher is with the class.

Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting
Another post on Langwitches Blog titled Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting was very informative to me. I did not know that to learn a new vocabulary word one must hear the word and hear the word in its corrective usage seventy or more times. In the blog, she suggest when learning another language to record a podcast of the language learners voice so that they can “see their voices, read the sounds, manipulate the sequence of sentences, sounds can be deleted, edited, emphasized and re-arranged similar than a word processing program can do this with the written word.”
When the class recorded their own script in Hebrew for their Hebrew studies, the teachers recorded them out of order and had the students out them in order. I think this is a fantastic idea! This is making sure that the students truly understand what it is they are saying. I wish my Spanish teachers did something like this when I had Spanish.

Podcasting with First Grade
The final post I read was Podcasting with First Grade. First off, I love when she said that her students were “eager to record their own voices to get them ‘into other people’s computers and iPods.” I can only imagine. Similar to when the class was doing an audiobook, the class recorded about the Magic Tree House series. The class did a question and answer session with the two main characters, Jack and Anne. She mentions how she coached the students on speaking loud, clearly, and being able to act out the part. She also said that she “could tell a drastic improvement among students in their confidence level and voice expression as we progressed in the book.” She mentions that shy students were coming out of their shell. I like a project that does this. It gives the students positive feedback which builds their self-confidence. It also pushes some of them a little out of their comfort zone which helps as well.