Thanks to my students and our REE teacher, I have learnt about a different strategy to read a large text with a group. I have called it “hive mind reading”. One of my students suggested this technique after having done this in an REE class. It was fun and successful. I think in small doses, this is a nice way to change-up the sometimes necessary evil of group reading. I did this with a boisterous group of Year 10s and they read out the whole text in perfect harmony and concentration.
This is how it works:
- Take a large text you want all students to read.
- Instruct students that THEY are the “hive mind”, and they will be silently organising the reading of this text. One of them will start reading and will stop after finishing a sentence when ever in the text.
- Any other student can take over, but students must not talk among themselves, cannot say anything to each other apart from reading the text.
- They have to listen to each other carefully. Two people cannot start reading at the same time, if that happens, one person will have to yield graciously to the other without discussion.
- A person cannot read more than once.
Variety 1:
- Stipulate that everyone can only read one full sentence.
Variety 2:
- For a shorter text: Each student reads ONE word. If doing this, it is best to determine the order of reading, i.e. row by row or snaking through the class.
- I tried this variety with my students too and they did not like this one as much because it makes the text disjointed and hard to follow.
- It does have some entertainment value though.