Foundations Newsletter

Love can make you do impossible things, and the love of reading opens up our minds to unexpected horizons. My Level II students made wonderful test subjects in a reading experiments. When required, I created reading activities that were a bit unconventional. I found a video about a lion and added my own subtitles. I then told my students they needed to watch the short movie and read the subtitles. This was followed by a Kahoot in which they answered questions related to the video.

They enjoyed the activity, thinking it was related to understanding the content of the movie (because I told them I was going to question them on the movie). However, in reality, the whole exercise was simply to get them to read more without them realising it. When I asked them what they thought of the reading activity, they were quite confused and asked ‘What reading exercise?’ They only realized it was a reading activity after I explained it.

This little trick on my test subjects minds’ gave them courage to try reading more. However, they tend to complain when the reading is on paper and less so when they read subtitles on video content. Maybe they are environmentalists at heart and hate the use of paper.

Video and Kahoot for the lesson is available upon request