Classroom Story Books

While coming up with ideas for my class library for free-choice reading, I'm tackling the issue of providing materials that are interesting for students while still being comprehensible.  Using childrens or other books, particularly for beginners, is difficult because they often contain strange and unusual words or ideas that are really not necessary or even helpful for devloping fluency.  Mreover, students will get discouraged when struggling to read books meant for children much younger than them.    One solution I plan to use is by providing leveled readers designed specifically for second-language learners, such a Blaine Ray's mini stories and novels.  I fact, I've got an entire set of beginner Spanish books from his site on the way to read and select my favorites to order for the class!   I've also been toying with the idea of providing my own reading materials based on the structures and stories used in my own classroom, which led me to this idea...

At the end of each year, I want to type up and bind/publish a collection of all the stories created within a class.  We would record each story we tell and each class would have their own book.  I imagine that many students would probably want their own copy as well, which would be an excellent resource to show evidence of and review what they learned that year.  

I got even more excited when thinking about how to get these recorded - In a combination of ideas from the MoreTPRS listserv, I plan to assign three students each story day to re-write the story from class in Spanish (I might consider dong it in English for the first few weeks in Spanish 1) and create an illustration.  I would be willing to take volunteers for the three people assigned that day to do it to ensure I got at least one version back, but I would probably require each student to submit a mininum number of re-writes whenever they wanted to throughout the semester as part of their citizenship grade.

 Edmodo would be great for this (though illustrations would probably need to be turned in on paper) as students can submit their stories that night and I can provide individualized feedback on their writing.  The next day, for review, I could also edit/combine the stories and hand out correct versions of a few stories for students to read and review the story from the day before.  Ultimately, I would create one "master" version that I would combine with the illustrations to go into the class story book to be published at the end of the year.  I love this idea because we can do so much with it with listening, reading, and reviewing, as well as create so many personallized resources for the class and that students will love to have for themselves!