Learning to read under water! Reading is COOL!

Today we had great fun beating the heat by reading in the swimming pool – under water! Diving for words. Not only did I keep cool getting splashed as the children rushed to ‘retrieve’ the words but it was  exctiting to see the ‘lesson’ being so effective! For the beginner readers they just retrieve one word at a time. The objective for the more advanced readers is for them to collect appropriate words to form a grammatically correct sentence. The motivation? The children LOVE swimming under water and diving for objects, they respond to the  thrill of mild competition and it’s a novelty! For the teacher, the evidence of reading is in the sentence construction, the retrieval of the correct word or the student reading the words he/she surfaces with! My only regret is that I didn’t fall into that clear cool blue water while reaching out to collect the words from the children… but they very enthusiastically  delivered each word to me at the side of the pool, asking for the next ones to be thrown in!