Often as a teacher, you may have a challenging task to make your student read the assigned homework chapters before class. Dealing with students who don’t have the inner drive and motivation to empower themselves with knowledge can be tough. As an English teacher, reading homework ideas should help you deal with such attitude and behavior of your students. Here is some reading homework help that may be the perfect practical strategy to make your students read homework.
Reading homework ideas
- Ensuring flexibility
Some of your students can be good readers, while others can be poor at homework reading. With such a scenario, you may be afraid that your lesson may fail to be productive due to the cluelessness of those students who have not read. Being flexible enough means changing your approach to teaching to engage the readers and the non-readers. The non-reading students can have a make-up reading homework session as you take through the other student over a mini-discussion
- Planning of lessons not exclusively inclined to the reading support and homework
Such a strategy may be counter-intuitive but can be one way to get non-reader students in your class to learn and prevents the scenario that gives rise to the realization that fully text-dependent lessons don’t work. Include close read activities and excerpts in your lesson plan to engage the students who have not done their assigned reading. Transform weekly reading homework to important and knowledge endowed excerpts that students can analyze in class without dealing with homework reading challenge. Have small collaborative groups in your lesson made up of a mixture of the readers and non-readers to make your lessons productive.
- Structuring time for reading out aloud during lessons
To be sure that your students read may require you to structure your lessons so that there is a time when students read out loud the study materials. There are benefits of students reading aloud in class, such as that it involves all of them and provides a foundation for the novel or reading material you are using. If you get the students hooked to that novel by reading together in class out loud, you may be capable of making them read the whole book, even for those students reluctant to start a new book. When the worse gets worse, and the difficult students still fail to read the book, you can feel comfortable reading the first chapter of the book in class.
- Supplementing reading with film analysis
Students struggling with reading can be helped by using films to supplement your lesson’s objectives rather than having to use a film to substitute reading homework. Films can effectively emphasize what you are teaching as it is a different medium that can provide insight into what the lessons are about. There are various features of a film such as background music, tone of voice, colors, sound effects representation of symbolism, and sound counts, among many more that can be useful for English reading. Through films, you can make expert observers out of students not patient enough with reading homework.
- Providing resources and any support needed
Have as many resources as possible to recommend to your students to accomplish the reading homework goals. You can be lucky if the books you cover in lessons are in other forms such as e-books and audio-books. Make available physical books, audio recordings, films that can meet the needs of your students with different likings and preferences.
Conclusion
Making reading homework effective requires you to be enthusiastic, creative, and engaging in your lessons and planning. Encourage your students to be accountable for their work to ensure they don’t form the mentality of always getting away without reading. Have a retake policy for unaccomplished homework reading to keep them focused. With other ideas, you can hopefully cope with non-reader students and get your whole class knowledgeable.
