Day 1 - Miriam

What is something you did that you loved?
There are lots of things I loved about my year teaching Latin III... but... if I think about something that I loved and will continue to loved, I'm going to have to go with Free Voluntary Reading. 
Last year, Rachel and I did a podcast series on The Reading Whisperer and I took many ideas from it. When it came time to set up my expectations for FVR, I knew I wanted to establish the kind of space the author had. It is something I'm still working on, but I am very pleased with how it went this year and I am sure it will only get better. 

What I did
Since I was teaching Level III, my students already had some reading skill (so when I do this with my Is this year, it will be different). I started by discussing with them the rules for FVR:

1. We read, 3 days a week. 
2. We read - we don't write, we don't talk, we don't draw - we just read. 
3. WE read, meaning that I am expected to read too. 
4. We'll start with 10 minutes and increase time as needed. 

Since I was just starting this process with them, we only got to about 12 minutes, but I look forward to having even more time to read with the Is that start with me. 

We also established some expectations for what they would read:

• Any book in Latin that was in the FVR library. 

This included all the available novellas that we had bought, as well as a few other books in Latin that I had. I went ahead and added them even though they were well above the reading level of my students because the interest was there. 

My Reflection