One of my favorite series to use for teaching reading is Classic Tales by Oxford University Press.  They are well written and illustrated.  They are nicely leveled and reinforce vocabulary.  There is a cassette tape and adtivity book for each title.  They are fairly short, 18 pages of story text with a similarly sized activity book.  They are inexpensive.

The kids really seem to enjoy doing the story books.  They study reading with their Korean teacher, but often they use books that only have a paragraph or two followed by questions.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But reading an entire story, a real book, gives many of the kids a sense of satisfaction they don’t get with shorter passages.

I enjoy teaching them because it breaks up the monotomy of teaching Language five days a week.  With my afternoon language classes, I’ve gone to doing reading on Tuesday and Thursday, language on Monday and Wednesday and writing on Friday.  All three skills are so closely tied, that it makes sense to teach them like that.  I often use the story books or writing activities to reinforce what we learned in the language book.

Overall, it’s a win – win situatioin.