Would you believe ... ?

• The parents of two daughters eagerly await the birth of their third child, hoping for a son. They get a big surprise -- quadruplets! All four are...girls!

• A waitress accepts a lottery ticket as a tip, instead of cash. And the ticket wins $6 million!

• A middle-aged couple are still in love and want to stay married -- but they just can’t get along. What is their solution to the dilemma? Separate side-by-side houses!

These stories, selected from mainstream news sources, are very low-level but high interest -- humorous, poignant, astounding -- and all true! They are told as simply as possible -- exclusively in the present tense -- and all stories are less than 1/2 page long.

Very Easy True Stories, by Sandra Heyer, is an ideal first text for students with little experience with English. It is a companion book to All New Very Easy True Stories, which is at the same level but features all new stories and exercises. These two parallel readers give students the option of lingering at the low-beginning level. They can go back and forth between Very Easy True Stories and All New Very Easy True Stories, or they can complete first one book and then the other. Or teachers can use Very Easy True Stories one semester and All New Very Easy True Stories the next. That way, students who stay in a low-beginning class when their classmates move on to the next level can essentially repeat the class but with all new material. Combined, the two books offer 28 stories, giving teachers multiple opportunities to incorporate reading into their thematically-based instructional units.

Features

• First, students see a series of captioned pictures that clarify the meaning of the sentences beneath the pictures.

• Next, students read the story in text form for real reading practice.

• Finally, students complete exercises following each story to develop basic reading skills as well as build pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary proficiency.

The True Stories series includes:

True Stories Behind the Songs

Very Easy True Stories - nidottu, Englanti, 1998