Listening to Reading

Students have the option to select Listening to Reading as one of their Daily 5 choices.  We have MP3 players for this purpose.  Every month I change out the audiobooks.  Students can listen to the books independently, or with a partner, using a 2-way-splitter.

When I first started teaching, my audiobooks came in cassette format, from Scholastic Book Clubs.  They now come in CD format.  I transitioned from cassette to CD back in 2003, and then to MP3 format in 2005.  To transition to MP3 I burned every CD audiobook that I had to Windows Media Player.  You could do this using iTunes as well.  I still keep the copies of the CDs.  You never know when you’ll need to burn them again!

We have four MP3 players.  I highly recommend getting a player that has the LCD screen.  My students use this to find the title of the book after they select it on their paper playlist.  Each Listen to Reading box (green in the pictures) has a stack of books, a paper playlist (usually laminated or in a page protector), an MP3 player with pre-loaded audiobooks, and a pair of headphones.

Each month I load my playlists on to the MP3 players using Windows Media Player.  I have the playlists sorted by month.  As you see in the picture below, each month has four playlists.  Each playlist is added to an MP3 player at the start of the new month.  I wipe the player clean before adding a new month’s worth of playlist material.

In the picture below you can see the titles within September Playlist #4.  When I burn the CD to my computer (Windows Media Player), I edit the information after the CD is burned to Windows Media Player.  The first column reminds me that it’s for playlist #4, the second column is the order that it appears on the paper playlist, as well as on the MP3 player.  The length shares the length of the book.  Contributing Artist is changed to the number of the book on the playlist, and then there’s the title of the book, so that I don’t forget, since I changed the actual title to a number previously.  On the MP3 player, the only information that is displayed for students is the Title and Contributing Artists, so they see JUST THE NUMBER.

I then create paper playlist menus for my students and laminate them (or slide them into a page protector).  The playlist menus are simple with the book cover and sometimes the title of the book.  I add the playlist number as well so students know that they can find that book on the MP3 player easily.  Below  you’ll see a sampling of what the playlists look like (from January and October).  One our MP3 players went missing this past January, so we were down to three players, and that’s why you only see three menus.  And for the October playlist menus, I forgot to add numbers to the book titles, so I just wrote those after I printed.

What’s your procedure for Listen to Reading?