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Today, trying to find something useful to do while
students are away for spring break, I hopped on Twitter. Twitter always has a link or a comment
that makes me feel like I didn't just waste an hour. Especially with all of the IATEFL material being made available. Still, I was in a funk after a
while. I wanted to do something
for my students. I'm not a big
materials kind of guy. I can't
draw, don't like crafts, and try to get my students to either bring in or make
most of what we use in class. But
Michael Griffin sent me a
timely tweet. Went something
exactly like this: "I wonder if you have considered writing books for
ELLs. Not textbooks perse but
creative fiction pitched at a certain level." So I decided to give it a try. I find that it's the higher level beginners that I have the
most trouble finding genuinely interesting materials for, especially
fiction. So with that in mind I
wrote the following story. It
includes the Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level and Reading Ease Score. As you're reading take a moment and try
and gauge how difficult you think the story would be for your students. Feel free to copy and paste the text
and use it however you would like.
If anyone has any ideas for interesting ways to work with the text in
class, suggestions would be much appreciated as well.
OK, on to the story…
How To Float
There is a town I know.
It is not a big town. Actually, it is quite small. In every
way, it is a very ordinary town. There are 2 convenience stores.
There is a library with a large collection of thick and serious books.
There is an old handmade ice-cream
shop. And the people who live in the town seem ordinary when you first
meet them. They smile and say, “Good morning,” in the morning. They
wave and say, “See you later,” at the end of the day. They wear blue
jeans and t-shirts and laugh at jokes. But for all of that, they are
quite different from you and me. The people in the town are always
floating an inch or two off the ground. They float, but the people of the
town cannot fly. At least I have never seen them fly. They just
float above the sidewalk. And only a little. It is very easy to
notice them floating when they get on a bus. Instead of climbing the
stairs, they just float up into the bus. I lived in the town for one
year. I was a science teacher at the high school. Every day I went
to school and taught my science classes. One day, I asked my best
student, Chad, why all the people in town floated. He was a clever boy
with light brown hair and lots of freckles on his nose. He laughed and
said he didn’t know. I hoped that if I lived in the town, if I drank the
town’s water, if I made friends with people in the town, I would start to
float, too. But I never did. After one year my girlfriend and I
decided to get married. She lived in New York. So I moved.
Before I moved, Chad gave me a letter, but said I shouldn’t open it until
I was married. The day after my wedding I pulled out the letter and read
it. It said, “We float, because we know this town is our only home.
We float because we know that we will never leave. That is the
secret.” I looked across the table at my new wife. I thought about
my new life. I knew just what Chad meant.
96.88% of words within
GSL. (97.9% excluding proper
nouns)
Flesh-Kincaid grade level:
4
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
Score: 81
