Language Experience Approach and Dr. Seuss

In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday, for the past two weeks my reading instruction has centered around texts my students created after repeated readings of The Sneetches, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and Green Eggs and Ham.  I used the Language Experience Approach with students to create texts on their level that we could read and work with all week.  In their article, The Power of Language Experience for Cross-Cultural Reading and Writing, authors David Landis, Joanne Umolu and Sunday Mancha assert that LEA is "a means of providing interesting and relevant texts for diverse students' reading and writing."  I often use LEA when I want to introduce my students to rich literature that is too vocabulary dense to be an appropriate text for them to work with independently.

My kindergarten students listened to and (even during the first reading!) helped me read Green Eggs and Ham.  We used the book to study transportation and food vocabulary, most of which were new to my students.  Then, we wrote a very simple text together about foods we don't like to eat.  Every few lines, we threw in their favorite refrain, "I will not eat it here or there.  I will not eat it anywhere."  They gleefully shouted those lines when we came to them.  Using our Language Experience Approach-created text, students took turns tracking the words and performing the return sweep while reading.  We also used their text to practice counting words in a sentence and to identify words they knew using word swatters.  This was a quick way to take notes on which of my kindergarteners are still working on many of these Concepts About Print, and which have already mastered them.

In first grade, we read The Sneetches.  We're in the middle of a unit on friendship, so this book fit in nicely!  In addition to focusing on the theme of the book (not judging others by what's on the outside), we also wrote a summary of the book that we used as one of our texts this week.  Two of my first graders are still working on one to one matching and recognizing kindergarten sight words, so that was their focus with our word work this week.  My other students are working on r-controlled vowels and transition words like "First", "Next", "Then", so they worked with those skills.  Language Experience texts give teachers the opportunity to use one text to work with students at a variety of levels, which is very helpful in an ESL pull-out class setting.  We often have limited time (30-40 minutes) and multiple levels of language proficiency in our small groups, so being able to use one text to teach many skills makes better use of our precious time!

My second grade students also created a Language Experience text, but theirs was a different format.  Before I read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, I explained to students that the story was about a boy who, when walking home from school, imagines all the wonderful things he could see.  We then made a list of all of the things they see on their bus ride home from school.  Once we made our list, I read them the book.  We discussed the differences between what the boy imagines he could see and what we really see on our way home each day.  The following day, I re-read the book.  We then made a list of the imagined sights along Mulberry Street.  The students then made lines to compare similar items in the lists.  We talked about why it's important to make connections while we read.  The students completed our book study by writing their own version of the book: And to Think That I Saw It on Walnut Street (our school's street name).  We published the stories and hung them in the hallway for our friends to read.

LEA gave my students the opportunity to work with great literature at their level.  By taking their ideas and thoughts about what we read together, I was able to correct grammar in a natural, conversational setting, encourage the use of new vocabulary, and demonstrate to students that their words and thoughts are worthy of study.  All in all, a fun and successful week using the Language Experience Approach to make Dr. Seuss's lovely literature accessible to my students learning English. 

Happy reading,
Jacquie