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How Much Reading When?
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84 thoughts on “How Much Reading When?”
I decided to plow through Piratas in my spanish I class and we’re only on day 3. HOW OBVIOUS it is that reading input is LESS compelling than auditory input… i wonder if it isn’t more practical to put these novellettes out there for free reading. The kids who want to will pick them up and those who don’t won’t until they want to…
Grant, I thought it was just me. I began reading after exams to change things up a little. I put aside Pauvre Anne in favor of Pirates, but it is taking forever. Plowing only works for me after we have discussed and circled lots of the structures. Laurie said to try to relate the text to the kids in the class. I have tried to make a modified readers theater work and some days are better than others. The reading assessment they like most is the questions asked in English with the information which supports the answer written in French. They sit together in groups and really read and re-read the chapter and point things out to each other. Other days it feels like I am dragging a wet blanket around with me. I am going to try to act out chapter 5 as Ben and I saw it done at iFLT in California. Something in me just does not want to bail on the novel, but I’d sure like to speed it up BUT …slow, the brain craves novelty, not too much reading in level 1 and the beat goes on!
Gayle Traeger can make the drama work but I can’t. She lives in LA, has a background in theatre, has perfect French, likes to laugh, plans her classes, brings tons of props, has the personality of a director, etc.
And on the novels, what was really odd – I couldn’t believe he said it – was when Krashen said that the little novels out there were GOOD. Obviously he has never tried to use them.
I generally go through a chapter or two and milk all I can in reading and aural CI out of what we read and then tell them what happens in English and dump it.
My best reading teaching is in the readings we get from stories but even then, as Grant said, how obvious is it that even they are not all that great.
Is it so odd to just wait until spring of level 2 to blow their minds with real books from the real culture? I don’t see what is so bad about doing that. Yes, I will read in level 1. Nope, I won’t do it at that same 50/50 level I have not been able to attain in the past few years.
Since I don’t have that ability to make a novel come alive for kids, I would think that relegating the crappy ones we have now to the FVR cabinet is actually a very good idea, Grant.
But as you well know we need new stuff because we have to have novels. We can’t just teach reading via stories, as great as that is. I can’t wait to see what kinds of concrete products grow out of this discussion in a few years with the blazing talent we have in our PLC.
And Grant thanks for saying that about how obvious it is that the input is so clearly less compelling in these bad novels. I thought it may have just been me.
I think that the question is not only how much, but when and how? Plowing has never, ever worked for me. I like to think of it as “massaging” the novel. :o) When it isn’t going well, it is almost always because either a) the language is too difficult, b) I’m going too fast or c) I’m not connecting it to the kids.
I have a group right now that are very slow processors AND do not like to read AND have a reputation for stubbornness AND would rather be entertained and speak in English than do anything in Spanish because they believe that they are bad at school, therefore, terrible at Spanish.
I am having to use the novel Casi Se Muere in a way I have never ever used it before. I am so tempted to chuck it some days. :o) Or run through it. But when I resist the urge and find ways to make it accessible and successful and connected….it works!!!!!!
Reading is a highly complex process and we secondary teachers know so little about it. We are used to them showing up with reading skills and we assume that the skills should magically transfer themselves from one language to another. It is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more complicated than that.
Here’s what we now know, as a group this blog:
Reading works.
Reading works when:
The words become a picture in the mind/heart of the reader.
The reader cares about the material.
Everything else that we work on falls into those two categories.
with love,
Laurie
…we are used to them showing up with reading skills and we assume that the skills should magically transfer themselves from one language to another….
This is huge. We must read at the level of their understanding. We have learned ways of doing that in stories. What are some ways we can do that in readings, given that the readings don’t grab their attention as much?
…we are used to them showing up with reading skills and we assume that the skills should magically transfer themselves from one language to another….
It is true that many reading skills transfer from one language to another, but when the skills are lacking, there is nothing to transfer. One of the things I try to do is point out the skills as we use them and remind students that things like context clues, predicting and visualization work no matter the language.
We must read at the level of their understanding. We have learned ways of doing that in stories. What are some ways we can do that in readings, given that the readings don’t grab their attention as much?
Just a couple of ideas:
1. Try to create some enthusiasm before starting the reading. Just like no one cares about Ricardo or Genevieve in the textbook, no one cares about Anna or Petra in the readings.
2. Tell them the plot essentials before reading. My level 1 is currently reading Arme Anna. I intended to start chapter 3 today, but we got sidetracked. (One of my students asked about the title of a book on the reading rack, Waffen und Rüstung – “Weapons and Armor”. We spent the rest of the period with me pulling a battle axe, mace, two swords and a surcoat out of the closet in the room and telling them about working for Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament as a knight – in German of course. It was really interesting to watch them rise to the challenge of formulating questions above their current ability because they genuinely wanted to know.) Now I’m glad we didn’t start reading, because I will have the opportunity to prepare them better by giving them the plot of the chapter. Sometimes we – or at least I – tend to think we have to keep the plot a secret so we don’t “spoil” the reading. It isn’t that kind of a book, and we won’t spoil anything by telling student ahead of time what they are going to read. It’s called scaffolding
3. Get better readers. I’m absolutely serious about this. One of the weaknesses of the Blaine Ray readers that I have encountered is that they try to “set the stage” and tell us about the main character before getting to any action. It’s much better to begin the story in medias res. Think about how the James Bond movies open – full-on action sequence. Ben and others do this naturally when creating stories: start with a verb, and you’re already involved in the action. That’s why I started my level 3-4 German reader in the middle of a class discussion about courage and got to a fight in the first chapter. (BTW, I got a proof from the printer today and should have the first run before the end of the month.) Also, reveal character through action and dialogue rather than description. Put any truly necessary lexical help in a footnote at the bottom of the page so students don’t have to stop the reading process to find the words that the author knows are “out of bounds”. (I did this with medieval terms that were essential to the story but definitely not high frequency.)
Having finished my first book, I’m working on another. Actually, I have a second level 3-4 reader (set in German East Africa at the start of WWI) well under way and the start of a third (set in the North Sea area around 1400), but I – at the instigation of Ben – have started working on a level 1 reader as well. Right now it starts in the middle of a soccer game. OK, enough of the shameless plug.
Well, I am very glad for your plug!!! Now I have something to look forward to. Especially the one set in medieval times. One of my level II’s favorite word is “Ritterstechen” ever since they went to one of those medieval festivals in 6th grade. By the time your novel comes out (can’t wait!!!), they’ll be in level III and hopefully up to the task.
Brigitte there is something very cool about a language teacher knowing favorite words of their students. It’s new. Or, at least, I can’t recall a time when language teachers knew their (non four percenter) students’ favorite verb conjugation, or verb tense. Times are changing!
(Although, as a four percenter, I am not shy to say that I am still in love with an old flame from my days in France, the super sexy pluperfect subjunctive. Does anyone else have some old flames from their days as four percenters that they would be willing to share with the group?)
You will note that I try to make materials available on my site and that we have Bryce’s in Spanish. Although he has tons of stuff for teachers, he doesn’t have any Spanish readers. Robert if we can get some of your stuff into Brigitte’s hands, or Matava’s or the other German teachers in our group, we can make decisions on their relative value at certain levels and maybe offer them here. Look, let’s get over it – we don’t have any good readers. Let’s make some. Sorry if that offends anybody.
Re Spanish: I just happen to have sufficient hubris to have translated and adapted my reader to Spanish. I’m working on getting it proofread and footnoted.
At the risk of offending someone, the more I use the Blaine Ray readers (especially Poor Ann and The Trip of His Life), the more frustration I feel. There are holes in the plot of “Trip” that are big enough to drive a Mack truck through. Ann’s “dilemma” – especially in the German version – just isn’t engaging. She goes to Switzerland – Switzerland! – to learn that her life isn’t so bad. The plots in other readers are very similar and rather formulaic.
At iFLT 2010 I attended Karen Rowan’s session on writing a Second Language Reader. That gave me the final impetus to write my book; Karen was very encouraging and supportive. But she said one thing that I disagree with. Her comment was that a reader can’t be interesting to more advanced readers and still hold the attention of beginners. Given the popularity of Dr. Seuss books at all levels, I disagree; there is no reason that the plot and action cannot be engaging even though couched in simple language. (After all if some of the deepest theological thought can be expressed in words of primarily one to two syllables, why not a story? Example: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: the same was in the beginning with God, and without him was not anything made that was made.” The longest word in the passage is the word “beginning”, yet the thought expressed is profound.)
It isn’t easy to do – Theodor Geisel would attest to that- but it is possible. But then I tend to tackle challenges. (I’m currently working on a poem in the style of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse; when I was getting my MA in Spanish, I took up my professor’s challenge to write a sonnet in Golden Age style – he said I was the first student ever to do so. Don’t tell me something can’t be done, I’ll try to do it. :-)) [I sure hope that doesn’t come across as bragging.]
Robert, I am in the early stages of writing a mini novel for my Latin students, and I’d love to see Karen Rowan’s materials. Do you (or anyone else) have a link to her handouts from that session, if they indeed exist online?
John,
I don’t have any materials from Karen; the session was an oral presentation with a lot of questions and answers. Some of the things I remember:
–Write every day; it doesn’t matter if it’s only a sentence, if you don’t have the discipline to write every day, you won’t finish the book. I have found this to be very sound advice. Of course, there will be the occasional day on which the world conspires to keep you from writing, but if you start excusing yourself then it’s all over.
–Writing isn’t the hardest part; editing is. It is also the most time consuming. I wrote my book in a couple of weeks while on vacation in Europe. (Of course, the idea had been rattling around in my mind for a couple of years.) The revising, proofreading and editing took nearly two years. (A lot of that time, though, was waiting on other people to get back to me with comments and corrections.)
–Don’t expect to make money on your book. Another good piece of advice. At the moment I have invested a couple thousand dollars in the book and haven’t sold a single one. As Ben pointed out elsewhere, there is money to be made – but don’t expect to be the one to get rich, especially if dealing with a “less-taught” language.
–Do it because you “must”. This really needs to be a labor of love. At the same time, when you turn it over to others for proofing and comments, you have to sacrifice your ego for the greater good of a better product. My last proofreader, a non-teacher native German speaker, pointed out some logical inconsistencies and places that didn’t really work. By re-writing them I achieved a more compelling and believable story (which sounds strange, I know, for a work of time-travel fiction, but verisimilitude is important – the work has to be logical on its own terms).
Expect most of the people you ask for help not to come through. I also found this to be true. I asked friends and on a couple of lists for help and got several replies from people volunteering to help. I then sent out physical copies of the book and made electronic copies available. Several people never contacted me again, so I have to wonder about their motives. A few people made an attempt but then told me they didn’t have the time. I appreciate both the initial effort and the fact that they communicated with me about not being able to continue. Three people came through in a big way, and I am very thankful for them.
Anything you send to others needs to be 1) put in a pdf so it can’t be changed; 2) labeled as a draft in big letters on every page; 3) labeled with a copyright notice on every page. That was Karen’s “voice of experience”. She said that you don’t want a lot of variants floating around because you have to keep track of them; you want to be sure that nothing looks like a final copy until it truly is a final copy; there are dishonest and unethical people out there who will try to steal your work – even some who are “friends”. Fortunately, I have not seen any of the last caveat with my book, but I followed Karen’s advice on the first two.
There will always be typos, even after the book is published. Very true. After setting the book aside while others worked on it, I could pick it up and find another typo that we had missed. My two native speaker proofreaders missed typos. I’m sure that I will find more when I get the book back from the printer. I guess that’s what second printings are for – correct the typos.
Don’t expect to write the “Great American Novel”; in fact, if it is interesting to you, it won’t be interesting to the students and will likely be beyond them. Here is where I disagree with Karen – not in the first part about the Great American Novel, but in the second part. The goal is not to write the Great American Novel, so I don’t mind not having done so. However, I believed when I started and believe still that a story can be interesting to adults and children alike, so I set out to write a reader that would appeal to level 3-4 but still be enjoyable to the teacher. I like to think I accomplished that. Obviously, it will be harder to do for level 1, but I believe Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) managed it. So have others.
Now some things from me:
Find quality proofreaders who will be honest with you and do more than just correct language errors. Two people in particular helped me in this regard. One is a German teacher here in California; the other is someone I met online in a German-English dictionary forum and then met in person when I was in Germany. Both are native German speakers. Especially the latter proofreader was willing to tell me when something didn’t work or didn’t make sense to her. We exchanged e-mails and comments until we arrived at something. Sometimes I decided to leave what I had because the more sophisticated, “idiomatic” version would introduce too much new vocabulary; sometimes I had to explain something factual or culturally medieval that she didn’t know – then I knew that I would need to make it clearer for the readers; sometimes neither my version nor her initial suggestion worked, and we tinkered until we found something that would; sometimes her suggestion would spark an idea that was much better than the original; sometimes her suggestion was spot on, so I incorporated it. A lot of the corrections were a word, an ending, a prefix – small things. A few of the corrections involved wholesale re-writing of a paragraph, a passage or a section.
Treat these proofreaders with the respect they deserve. They are a treasure. All of my proofreaders were willing to do what they did without remuneration, but I sent them a gift or gift card when they were done.
Get advice from people who have already done what you want to do. In addition to Karen, I contacted other German teachers I know who have published. They gave me excellent advice about the process.
Decide whether to self publish or submit to a publisher. This is a fairly late decision, but think about it. My decision was to self publish, and I’m glad I made that decision. Without going into all of the ins and outs, one key element was retaining control over my work. In addition, I communicated with two German teachers, one of whom had self published and the other had gone with a publisher. The one who used a publisher had minor regrets; the one who self published had no regrets whatsoever. That said a lot to me; I even decided to go with his printer and am pleased with the level of service and help I have received.
Expect to invest a huge amount of time and effort – and even money – before you see any return at all. In addition to the time, effort and cost of producing the book itself, you will want to look into forming a business. An LLC may be viable for you, or you may simply want to do a DBA. Everyone’s situation is different, so do some research and then do what works for you.
Expect to become a salesman. Contrary to the message of The Natural, if you write it, they won’t necessarily come. You have to let people know that it’s out there. Avail yourself of contacts you have – just don’t use or abuse the people who are willing to help you. But don’t be shy about asking for help or assistance. The TPRS/CI community in particular is extremely helpful; most of us ultimately want to get quality materials out for the good of students. Unlike the big publishers, it isn’t all about the Benjamins.
Write about things that interest you. This sounds like I’m contradicting Karen’s advice, and perhaps I am. However, I believe she would agree that if the topic bores you, it will show in your writing. It’s a lot like what we do in the classroom. If I am bored with what we are doing in class, the students will sense that and reflect the attitude back. If my book doesn’t engage me on some level, it won’t engage my students.
Write about what you know. If you don’t have firsthand knowledge, do a lot of research. I had the advantage of having visited most of the places I wrote about, but not all of them. I also did a lot of research (e.g. how fast you travel through different kinds of terrain on foot and on horseback) and looking at maps, both online and on paper.
Show, don’t tell. There is room for descriptive text, but it’s better to reveal as much as possible through narrative and dialogue. Even the descriptive text has level of interest, e.g. “The sun was shining brightly” vs. “John was blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the Mustang’s rear window.”
Details and specificity add verisimilitude. Just as we try to get students to see the reading as a movie in their heads, it works better if you have a detailed image in your mind that you then transfer to text. I find it interesting that both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien said their works generally started with an image (e.g. a wardrobe that led to another world and a hobbit that lived in a hole in the ground). When I was writing my book, I found that the better I could visualize a scene or what was happening, the better I could describe it.
Expect to learn a lot. For the final chapter, I wanted the gang to think they had killed the hero. How to do that? I learned from research that when we relax either in sleep or unconsciousness, the eyes tend to roll up in the head because the muscles relax. So, I hung the hero upside down in a tree, gave him a concussion that knocked him out, left his eyes half open, and let one of the gang members see just the white of his eyes. Since the gang member wouldn’t know what I had just learned, his conclusion was that they had killed the hero.
I’m sure I will think of other things, but I hope this helps for the time being. I’m also going to put up another post with quotes about writing that I think are pertinent and valuable. Some speak to the process of writing, some to the end product, and some to revision.
Sorry this was so long.
No apologies for lengthy writing on this site, Robert. Look what I write. Look what I wrote below. I am told that I write too much too by lots of DPS teachers who say they don’t have time to read what we talk about here. But that is the nature of this site. Writing characterizes it. My response to those comments from teachers is that I don’t believe that it’s about how much time they have to read, but about their vision of this work. There are so many people out there doing so many versions of TPRS/CI (we don’t even know what to call it) but there are very few who do (or are even interested in doing) the kind of TPR/CI that we talk about here.
This is a very subtle point. I believe that those drawn to actually pay money for this site GET the ideas expressed here and those not on here DON’T GET what is expressed here. Huge point. It’s like why would someone join the Marines but someone else join another branch of the armed forces? We are very much like Navy Seals or Marines or Army Rangers. We are some special forces unit not yet invented and therefore we fly way under the radar. We are not for general consumption. We are bashers of this stuff. We are not playing around dancing, dipping a toe in and jumping back. We are mudders. It drives us half insane but we are mudders. We are, if there is a word, TPRS Commandos.
I love that. We don’t get too big that way and we don’t have to listen to that University of Iowa associate professor who used to get on here before the site was private and make random, uneducated comments that used to irritate me because she just didn’t get it and she and many others used to waste our time. I have noticed that the people on this site want, if I may say it this way, the good stuff. They don’t want to wait for inspiration in their teaching, they want to”go after it with a club” as Jack London says above.
I got into a good discussion with Diana Noonan about this last night. She said that there is too much to read on this site. People don’t read it. With the recent bumping of the last 65 non-paying members we are now down to under 80 members. I am making some big changes here, lowering the price to $4.95 per month because more than one group member have convinced that that the lower price is just as much as a deterrent to University of Iowa teachers as $7.95 and many young teachers have loans and the economy is in free fall.. We may be able to find more Commandos whom we can help and still keep the small feel that drives this site.
But it is the writing that works here. I can’t get on a video blog and bring across the kinds of things about CI using that medium. We must continue to use video – the fearless work Chris did here recently proves that. But the medium is flawed. I found my power cord and reviewed some of the Krashen video. Guess what? The best part, the part that Krashen commented on as truly compelling input, lost its voice track. I kid you not. I’m watching the class go along and Im getting psyched because the good part is coming up and the sound fricking cuts out. I rest my case on video. I hate tecnhology. Even in that class – I was trying to fit in a reading class for Krashen because he had already seen a story in the period before, and during that time something went wrong – we couldn’t find the reading in my computer and Diana had the only available printed form for the backup doc reader but we didn’t know that for ten minutes and the class stopped! With Krashen in it! About reading in L2!
No, technology is not my way of doing things. I’m getting old and soon nobody will say that (they might get arrested!) but I’m saying it and it feels good. Just today I had so many little annoyances with simple computer things. All that time lost away from CI. Plus, honestly, the bone marrow of a CI class just doesn’t come through on video. The bone does, but not the marrow.
The stuff that we share is professionally intimate. Technology of any kind, except these words shared via our computers, cannot get us to the levels of mindsharing that we need to attack the problem we are faced with, which is so huge. When we accept that acquiring a language is 100% an unconscious process (how many of in this PLC really do?) then the tables get totally knocked over, every one in the room. Once we realize that that room is our classroom, we cannot put the tables back the way they were. And that takes real courage.
Writing and talking in the comments field will probably always be the lifeblood of our group. It’s the closest we can get to a wine shop with all of us in it. And it’s private. Think about this – we share stuff that is so human. We share stuff that is so vulnerable, from whence comes real power. Look what Robert has written here, the beautiful quotes and how he remembered all that stuff from Karen. Wow. No, man, never apologize for writing too much. I’m not apologizing. Anybody not on the vibrational level of our group quit reading this a long time ago and maybe only five people made it this far. I don’t care. We are not about the masses. Our work is special. There are the blabbermouths here and then there are about fifty quiet ones. But they are welcome, of course, because they have sent in bios and I don’t smell any ringworm spies on here right now, thanks to you know who in you know where.
What we are doing is so “out there” it’s ridiculous. No wonder when we were being read by so many people on the open internet? We felt so exposed and let’s not even go into that. But now look how safe we are, doing this important communicative work that is only for mudders, commandos, and it just feels so safe and I look forward to coming back here so much after a good class or a bad class and reading what y’all say. We need baseball hats with TPRS Commando on them for the summer. Or maybe baseball bats. Hmmm.
And Robert the one thing that jumps out at me from the above is how you should get that book and change it the way Blaine does to other languages. I know that you would need a lot of help and that others, maybe from this group, would offer to help but not actually do it. What if we put it somewhere here in different language categories and get a handful of people to take it seriously (because we need better books) and translate it together and make it a group project? Then, when it is in, I am guessing, Spanish and French (no sleight intended) you could pull it off of here and self publish (the only way to go) and we can then add it to a new German materials list on the public access side of this site. Once we got what would be an admittedly sloppy translation of French and one of Spanish, then we could get it edited and go from there. On the self publication point, you could even go first with ebooks for group members before you even made the final three products available to Teacher’s Discover and all that, because if the book were in ebook form for purchase here, you could send out at no cost to you. I do that with my books and it is easy and the price is half for the buyer and a lot less trouble for me and especially for those overseas commandos. We have a guy in Russian and one in Hungary dude! Fricking Hungary! And one more thing. Expect to make money from this book. I haven’t even seen it but, from the way you have described it, can it be any worse that PA? And that is a million dollar book to Blaine.
I have to admit that I don’t always get to everything, but then when I have a chance I go back through and catch up. I think others do the same because all of a sudden there is a comment on something from weeks or months ago. That’s one of the nice things about the PLC – unlike the ephemeral nature of a conversation, the stuff is still there later to look at.
I already translated the book into Spanish. Now I’m looking for people to proofread, edit and comment. Unfortunately, my French isn’t adequate for the task, and it needs cultural adaptation as well as translation. Also, there is no English version; I composed it in German from the beginning. (Any German-French or Spanish-French medievalists out there?) I genuinely hope to make money from the book, I just don’t expect it.
Time for my next class.
Well if I may be able to speak for the group, we want to do all we can to help push this thing forward.
How’d that class go? What’d you do?
Level 1 is reading Arme Anna
Level 2 is watching “Das Boot” as part of a unit on WWII
Level 3/4/AP is doing “Virtual Vienna” (a Realm-like project in which students play older versions of themselves studying and working in Vienna)
Thanks for all the encouragement, Ben.
Well, I’m not a medievalist but a German French teacher. I’m ready to help if I can.
I could send you the German text (minus all the graphics, which take up a lot of bandwidth); we could discuss the adaptations, which involve re-setting the story to France rather than HRE or Spain. Or I could translate at least portions of it to English and put in the cultural adaptations myself.
The German text would be just fine, Robert. I would read a bit about the cultural and historical background and try the adaptations too. Contact me via my website or: m@rtin-anders.de
I’m so glad you might get involved Martin. Anyone in Europe is going to have a different feel for what a novel, what a story, is. Sorry, I love my country, but come on. The novel genetics, the fabulist tradition, the world of theatre found in Europe all go back a little further than ours. Hello!
I feel that there is so much work to be done on this mini novel front. And the time for it is now. After a few decades of really bad novels we need to put our attention to a few decades of really good ones, which actually meet the kind of novelistic criteria expressed by Michele and others in this thread and are crafted by word crafters and not thrown together like so many other American products.
Let’s keep pushing the novel ball up the hill. If you are sitting on something, like Chris’ horror story and Robert’s German novel which he cannot keep in only German, then communicate that through here and maybe we can network our way eventually into really good things to read.
Brigitte had mentioned that we share our contact information here and we never did. We need to do that now. How do we do that?
Robert I would like to recommend Martin. Hire him. He did send a perfect French version of the transition phrases we were all into about a month ago and it is posted here somewhere. By the way, one of the reasons for my fast approaching new site redesign is to make finding stuff easier. Hope it works.
On another point, if we can get some kind of collaborative support for your book and others going her, then I can’t say too many mean things about technology. Except maybe when it replaces CI in the classroom. That ain’t cool.
I just had an insight about the video thing from above. The fact is that none of us has even come close to realizing the potentional in this appraoch. We are babies, really. That is how great the work is, how great the transition away from the old teaching of death. As a result, what I have in my mind is not what I can capture in a class or on video. There is always a disconnect between the poetry of what we know can happen in a classroom (what I once called the Pure Land) and where we are today. In that sense, we who have a tendency to be hypercritical of ourselves and our work (so many of us!) see our work in negative terms and avoid putting video up. We think that there is something wrong with us when we have problems with kids who are totally responsible for their actions but who, in some odd arrangement, make it the teacher’s problem. I cringe when I see me teaching on video. I don’t like my voice, I find myself still after all these years using too much English, and on and on and on and on. Would that we could cancel our criticisms of ourselves and rest in the knowledge that this work we are doing is in its infancy state.
I too really appreciate both the QUALITY and the QUANTITY of the content on this blog. The stream-of-consciousness nature of the posts is only uninteresting to those who don’t realize what is going on in this little community. I not only make time to read as much of this as I can, but because of my new mindset and approach effected by this online community, I now HAVE THE TIME to read it. This is my work, much more important than all the obscure grading and prep work I used to do between classes. What better way to reinvigorate myself before a particularly difficult class than reading over some relevant posts, or watching a classroom video clip? The other public online communities out there (including my Latin Best Practices site) can’t come close to the quality and quantity of what we have going on here. It’s a safe place to be honest about the process, to have a real conversation without any academic or professional posturing, which results from fear, sometimes legitimate fear for our jobs. For me, this is way more helpful than reading about how a bunch of “page turners” are up in arms about a student posting an English translation of textbook readings online. They see that as a serious threat to what they do. So thanks again Ben and everybody.
John can I put that on the new site as a testimonial? And anyone else who wants to send a pic and a short quote – now’s the time as the new site launches by the end of the month at $4.95 and I will make those changes myself from this end.
Quotes about writing:
“A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.” C.S. Lewis
“Most new writers think it’s easy to write for children, but it’s not. You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story, write well, not be condescending–all in a few pages.”
Andrea Brown
“The best children’s book writers are not people who have kids, but people who write from the child within themselves.” Andrea Brown
“I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.” Madeleine L’Engle
“If you wish to be a writer, write.” .Epictetus
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Roald Dahl
“A kid is a guy I never wrote down to. He’s interested in what I say if I make it interesting.” Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
“As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.” Joan Aiken
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Robert Frost
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Jack London
“Fantasy’s hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.” Lloyd Alexander
“You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better” Maxim Gorky
“You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.” Madeleine L’Engle
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” Tom Clancy
“Books aren’t written- they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” Michael Crichton
“Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.” Richard North Patterson
“The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.” Gabriel Fielding
“Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.” Donald Hall
“A writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Plot springs from character… I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type.” Anne Lamott
“Don’t say the old lady screamed- bring her on and let her scream.” Mark Twain
Look you two I am going to be blunt without mentioning names. There is nothing out there. So write new stuff.
Robert and John we on this site – I hope I can speak for at least some of the other members of this site – have developed a kind of confidence born of lots of honest communication with both of you. You are as good as teachers get, in my view.
Therefore, I, for one, am very interested in what you both have going there in terms of your mini-novels. Just let us be the ones to use them and field test them. They don’t have to be in bound form either. They just have to be readable. Maybe we can test them as ebooks.
Just thinking out loud here. Just tell us when they are ready for purchase and we will set something up here for testing in blog members classrooms in the fall. It sounds like a good idea to me.
Good lord, gentlemen, how long are we going to be using materials that we find suck? We need the new novels and we need them for the fall. Will yours work also in French, Robert?
And then if your books suck (I doubt that), we can go from there. Somebody has to write something that we can use. When I can get through only one or two chapters of Pirates or Pauvre Anne before having to bail out, it’s time to go to something new and keep doing that until we have what we need – something interesting at the right level (level 1 in this case).
Sorry about being so blunt but this is the way I feel.
I would say that we need a book with the basic 300 vocabulary palate that we find in Pobre Ana to start, with plenty of repetition, and with high teen interest in the way Matava creates high teen interest – highly compelling – in her story scripts. I would also like a reader that has a plot, unlike PA, but one that has a plot that I can follow without wondering where people are and who is doing what, unlike Piratas. Any other criteria in case someone produces one for level 1 as a first novel?
Wow, what a great discussion going on here, and at the right time! In my Spanish I class we just finished Pobre Ana yesterday and after we read the final words in chapter 9 there was a relief among students that we were finally done with Ana. I joked with them that I can’t wait to start Patricia Va a California next week but I have no intention of doing so, they would HHAAAATTTEEE that. I was thinking about doing Piratas or Agentes Secretos, it seems to me that those would be much more interesting and engaging than Ana but I’m seeing some complaints in this discussion about Piratas so I”m guessing it’s not as interesting as it sounds.
I will also mention that I, too, am working on a little reader in Spanish as well. If some other Spanish teachers here would like to collaborate with me on this I would greatly appreciate it. I’m working on trying to simplify and make repetitive a story I wrote in my undergrad Advanced Spanish Composition class. I came across it a few months ago and though “Wow! This would make a great reader!” But it needs to be simplified, details added, repetition added. If anybody wants to work on this with me and be added as co-authors, post your email here and I’ll send you the .doc and we can start collaborating on this. When you start reading, you will be drawn in after the first paragraph.
This discussion has me pumped that we’ll start getting some interesting reading materials out!
If anybody would like me to send my story to you, give me your email and we can start collaborating. It’s going to need to be simplified, repetitions added, character development and if there are any experts on cognates, it would probably be helpful to replace a lot of the words with cognates to make it more suitable for a level 1 or level 2 class.
I think it’s a pretty interesting read. It’s a horror story. I would love to see it put into book form eventually.
jen@santbani.org
sounds cool! i’m no expert, but i am pretty fired up about this 🙂
It sounds like a lot of fun and so interesting, but, alas, I don’t speak Spanish, so I just keep watching from afar. Can’t wait to hear what you come up with. Keep us posted!
I have taught with Piratas three times. I have found these things to be true: When I prepare them well by giving them these following things, before we even open the book, they get so INTO this book; such a different experience than Pobre Ana:
(history of the period, some geography, hints about the romantic conflict, etc.)
There is no place in the rest of the curriculum where students learn about this part of the world during that time period. I literally have to start from zero.
I, also pulling out vocab, before we begin a chapter, that I know they don’t know (PQA as per what others have talked about here). The vocab gets repeated so much in the novel, I don’t have to beat this to death. The novel will do it for me if I can get them to feel comfortable looking for context clues, etc.
I use lots of visual cues: pictures of the characters blown up and on the wall writing a list of characteristics on the picture to which we add as time goes on, a big map of just the Caribbean with pins/string/little boats to move, and realia (plastic swords, hats, eye patch, scarves, blah, blah).
I also must have the willingness to get through the first few chapters with them until they KNOW the characters and start to feel invested in them, KNOW the setting and start to place the characters and plot there. I made power points of all of the places in the novels and preview them with the students so that they can visualize the action. (I even went to Campeche, México, a port city ravaged and burned many times by pirates–including Henry Morgan–visited two forts there, and took lots of pictures). The power points come back as a review after we read a chapter to help retell the plot of the story.
It is supremely difficult for beginning FL readers to hold all of the details of a longer reading (novel) without scaffolding (help). Recapping with them what has happened up until now (with visuals) before every chapter is so important. The mistake we sometimes make is to just translate the chapters and think that is READING. Reading is not just understanding the individual words as we go along. It is understanding the meaning of the whole: the plot, that characters, the conflicts, the application to their own lives. Doing this in the TL is NOT the same as doing it in English. The memory is taxed beyond belief and needs much support.
I am glad I had the support materials for this book. I adapted many of them (making sure they were comprehensible), and (I hate to say) the kids liked the dumb crossword puzzles at the end of class.
The first time I taught this was with the two WORST classes of my life–behavior wise–the year of massive administrative and parental interventions. They latched onto this book (after the first few chapters) like you wouldn’t believe. They got so into this book that I thought to collaborate with the music teacher for their Spring recital. I taught them an easy rhythmic poem of Nicolás Guillén; I taught them an Afrocuban song and chant; I taught them to dance in “clave” (not easy)–I got to use music class time–yes, it was extra work. A group of the kids even wanted to dance in front of their parents (unbelievable). At the recital, these kids got a standing ovation after this number–something I’ll never forget. None of it would have happened without beginning to feel connected to the book–not just the plot, but the “period”, the ambiance, etc. WE make that part happen.
Every time I have taught this book, I get better at it. All three times my kids read this book, they found it compelling–mostly because the characters were complex–everyone is flawed. All groups have reported feeling very accomplished after reading it. They are middle schoolers, not high schoolers. Perhaps, that makes the difference. I know it’s a good book when I get total stranger kids from the grade below asking me if we’re going to read Piratas next year (because they’ve been hearing so much about it in the halls).
This is not a pleasure reading book for kids who already read easily and independently in the TL (some of them not such hot readers in first language either). I believe this book can be a bridge to independent reading in the TL.
Laurie’s thoughts about creating the movie in their mind are crucial to this process. My thoughts are about KEEPING that movie in their mind so that they can make sense of the next chapter, etc.
In the end, if the teacher ain’t into the book, I don’t think the majority of the kids will be either. So, you’re right, you need to have books that you get excited about.
A bit of a ramble, but I wouldn’t throw this book out too quickly. My pov.
I’m with Jody. I teach high school and the kids really like this book. The freshmen boys especially like it. I do many of the same activities Jody talks about to help scaffold the novel and the novel goes much better when I do the front loading. The Dollar Tree is my friend for pirate props. We act out the chapter, sometimes it’s me behind a character/student saying the lines and sometimes the student just says/repeats it. I let them choose. We say the lines sadly, angrily, happily, etc. Then we read the chapter. I have done it the opposite, read the chapter then act it out, but all my students say acting it out helps them understand a lot.
But, I really have a bad time with Pobre Ana. Her problems are so ridiculous in my students eyes, so the don’t like reading it. They do, however, love Pat Verano’s songs. This novel does give me many opportunities to talk about the kids’ lives, but after chapter 4 or 5 I am so ready to move on to something else.
I just can’t do it and keep the L1 out of my mouth. I try, and I can’t do it without mashing in too much English. At one point last year just after Holloween, I loaded up with the pirate props. I even got a shoulder parrot. We tried a few scenes as per Gayle Traeger, but in them the kids couldn’t focus on the language, kept speaking English, forcing me into English, and half of the props, which were the preferred focus of the actors, were trashed by the end of those few weeks.
I had that problem at first too. (The 4×4 block schedule definitely has its drawbacks, but there is the huge advantage to be able to try it again in a few months time with a new bunch of kids. So now, they wear a hat, hold a sponge sword and sit in a chair until directed to do something. If they don’t do their job, I fire them. (I learned that one from you) 🙂
I don’t do all the details of the chapter. We do the main details and act out the parts I think will be more interesting to them. I can’t say I have a 100% buy-in every term, but many of my students ask when we start the Pirate novel when they are new to my class.
This is so right on. You’re channeling Gayle on that advice Clarice. Perfect. Thanks. In the end, on that book, I just can’t grasp/follow the script!
How cool would it be if someone in our group wrote like a really good chapter or two about something really imaginative and riveting t kids and then stopped and let us all try it out and then we could send feedback and the author could revise it and then add another level/chapter and in that way complete a book with real merit on a lot of levels. We could field test someone’s novel as it gets created. It’s an idea.We could help the author with the vocabulary, suggest plot ideas, insist on simplicity within a framework of humor, etc.
The other point from Michele is the one about the necessity of a plan when creating a class novel together with our kids in the classroom. There are so many things that need to be done keep the train on the tracks and the kids committed and interested in the book as it emerges. Michele was very specific about that. Unless we have a novel plan to make that work, it won’t. (get it? a “novel plan”?) Otherwise, it would start with guns ablazing and lose power, as she said, in two weeks. Oh hell. I mean oh well.
We are going to have to get some ideas here from each other’s field work on the Class Novel Plan. It’s soon March and we all know what happens to stories in March, and we can’t live on dictation for more than ten minutes each class as a bail out from stories.
This takes me to the next point. What to do as bail outs? (see Water Wings blog post on that). I have a list of stuff I will put here when I get a chance.
I want my bailouts to be connected to reading. It’s easier and that is key here – in the spring it seems to take three times the energy to do stories and write them up as readings and do the weekly plan than in the fall.
So this is an important question – how to make our fluency and literacy programs work in the spring when the state testing freak is walking around unhindered in the building grabbing from all our bowls of goodies and shoving them, using both hands, into its ugly mouth.
We need a plan for the spring because the energy is so different. Paul just does projects and sacrifices the CI because the kids like it and it gives him an early start on the summer, which is key for our mental health in this profession. I would do that if I liked to do projects but they make my socks roll up and down.
We do need a “Spring Plan” for CI.
Another idea that folks might want to consider is Nathan’s CYOA plan: Choose your Own Adventure. We were going to wait until later in the spring, when kids are really berzerk, to start that.
He’s got it all explained on these links:
http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/category/choose-your-own-adventure/
Start reading at the bottom of the page, with the oldest post.
My German 3-4-AP class recently read SOS aus Wien (SOS from Vienna). It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book from EMC publisher under the “Labyrinth” imprint of Teen Readers. We sat in a big circle, and I read aloud. When we came to a place where we had to decide what to do, the class talked about it and what might happen with each decision, then voted. They thoroughly enjoyed it. Now the book is available for FVR/SSR.
So, there is a market for this kind of book.
Great suggestions here for visuals Jody… I especially like the pictures of the characters blown up and hung on the wall (wallflowers!) I had forgotten about this important aspect a bit, until I read this comment of yours. And it really is true that some good maps are indispensable.
And it really is true that some good maps are indispensable.
An idea I picked up from Jason Fritze is to buy a plastic/nylon shower curtain or liner, make a map transparency and have your TA trace the map onto the shower curtain. Now you have a big map of what you want and don’t have to keep trying to “adapt” a map that isn’t really what you want. I did that for the Middle Ages, then had an artistic friend of mine turn those into maps for the book. (He also did the artwork.)
You can also do backgrounds and other artwork, not just maps. Since the curtains have grommets in them you can hang them. I currently have one hanging from the rail that is normally used to hold maps. Those sliding hooks work really well.
Nice… if only I could fit this project in sometime…
Thanks for the idea Robert.
…the mistake we sometimes make is to just translate the chapters and think that is READING. Reading is not just understanding the individual words as we go along. It is understanding the meaning of the whole: the plot, that characters, the conflicts, the application to their own lives….
May I have a few weeks to meditate just on that? I honestly cannot do all you do on this, Jody. Not even close. I do have a question. I am intrigued by your definition of scaffolding as help. Could you or any one else talk about scaffolding a bit?
Thanks! I am so appreciative of the San Francisco mega-minds – you and John.
Actually Jody I now think that your point about the text being more than just a reading exercise really fits in with what we know about comprehensible input in general.
I think I remember Krashen or somebody say that if it is not compelling to us it won’t be compelling to our audiences and that truth of CI probably applies to reading.
But then at what point and in what language, L1 or L2, do we start with the scaffolded instruction? Such large questions these are.
I would love to know what the basic plots are from all those trying to write. What I find in both my reluctant-reader English class and my Russian classes is that it’s harder to keep boys’ attention than girls’ attention (generally). Boys need action. They really get tired of any character evaluation or deep thinking. So I asked a wiggly ninth-grade boy in my advanced class to come up with a plot line that he’d like. We set up an outline by chapter, developed the characters a bit in class, and then pairs of kids wrote the chapters. Now we’re into the final editing stage, and Carol Gaab is promising to publish it. The kids need to draw pictures, and we still need to cut some of the vocabulary, but it’s been a lot of fun as well as frustrating.
The plot is that there’s a boy who likes a girl who has never noticed him. The book starts on the morning that he’s going to wear a shirt with a flamingo on it (she likes flamingos). His mom makes him take out the trash and his shirt is destroyed. He misses the school bus because he has to change, and the girl doesn’t notice him because he didn’t get to wear the shirt. Then he sees her coming down the hall and, befuddled, walks right into a popular football player, who promptly throws him into the trash. Amazingly, the girl doesn’t see him as she passes where he is standing in a trash can. The adventures continue; he makes a list of things to do to get her attention (buy flowers, give her chocolate, write a letter, bake her muffins), and the football player finds it and starts preempting him…in the end, everything works out with a cute twist. Hokey, but the trial classes (the level 1 group and my parent group) who have been reading it have chortled all the way through.
So! I would love to know basic plots, especially those imagined by young male teachers, as I suspect you have a better handle on what will “sell” with most kids than I do. Or at least you can conjure it more successfully. Once it’s in place, I recognize it, but I can’t put it on paper.
There are supposedly only eight basic stories in the world…found a link to a page with examples and explanations that might help us as we try to fill the world with interesting level 1 novels:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/blf10/Links/stories.html
…I asked a wiggly ninth-grade boy in my advanced class to….
This shines a big light on the future. Soon the days of 9th graders being in a level one class will be over. Kids will test in, depending on their background, at Novice Low, Mid or High or Intermediate Low, Mid or High.
Some slower processors will not be eliminated out of language programs because they can’t keep up. They will simply take the Novice Low class again. And then again if need be.
Fast processors will jump from a Novice Low class to a Novice High class. Teachers won’t have to teach students who complain that they are not being challenged. Kids won’t fail. Advancement will depend on how much band width a kid has, not how smart they are.
What a wonderful world this would be!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNO72aCnVr0
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be
Don’t know much about geography
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much about algebra
Don’t know what a slide rule for
But I know that one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be
I don’t claim to be an “A”-student
But I’m tryin’ to be
Maybe by being an “A”-student, baby
I can win your love for me
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about science books
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be
What a wonderful world this would be
What a wonderful world this would be
What a wonderful world this would be
Ageist! You’re an ageist! This is ageism. YOUNG male teachers? Surely Michele you didn’t see Brian Barabe’s Dead Elvis imitation in Los Alamitos. Or my “Check…check…check out that poulet now…check…check…check out that poulet now…check…check…check out that poulet now….CHECK! cheer and chant in my 8th period class today.
Gotta agree with Ben. I am 62 years old as of today, after all.
Zum Geburtstag viel Glück!
You caught me. And I apologize deeply! Especially to the one who has saved me lately from what could have been a horrible interview if I were on the answering end!! (How did that go, anyway, Robert??)
I’m a little age-ist with myself, I guess. I am very clear that I don’t think the same way as the kids any more. It’s why Storytelling works. The students give me ideas I would never have thought of in my life. Without this method (and probably without this group), I could no longer be teaching, because I wouldn’t have figured out how to relate to kids. Now I sometimes have the opposite problem: I agree with them when they tell me about something they’re doing in class somewhere else, and say they can’t see the point.
But it doesn’t mean that I can write stories out of my own head for them.
Here’s another page like that in case you like it:
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/seven-stories-rule-world-matt-haig
and these comments:
Ronald Tobias, author of “Twenty Basic Plots” believes the following make for good stories: quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, revenge, riddle, rivalry, underdog, temptation, metamorphosis, transformation, maturation, love, forbidden love, sacrifice, discovery, wretched excess, ascension, and decision.
Overlap must be common under this theory. For example, “Rocky” is a story of the “underdog,” who goes through a “transformation” and falls in “love” while on a “quest.” We’re not sure, but we think “Dude, Where’s My Car?” touches on at least 16.
(above from http://ask.yahoo.com/20070305.html)
Almost all these kinds of pages for fledgling writers say that, while there are only a few major types of stories, it is the way they are written that commands readers’ interest. I guess so…Poor Anna is a coming of age, a quest, and a discovery, and it doesn’t thrill anyone.
Maybe it won’t help to know the plots!
Michele, the point I take away from your posting is a reminder that we can’t tell students something and assume that it will be compelling to them. But if we are willing to hand the reins over to them, for example in creating a plotline, the product will be a LOT more interesting to them. It all comes down to whether they connect with the story. And I suppose that no ready-made book or technique, method, etc. is going to make that happen for us. Again, it forces us to give our attention to the students, to listen to them.
And thanks for the vote of confidence Ben. But it’s kind of scary to think that no one out there has a better idea of how actually to teach language to kids than us members of this community, who are groping around in the CI dark so often.
Yeah but it’s a good kind of dark.
Oh my gosh it’s in the air!!! I threw El Nuevo Houdini at my 3’s today for 8 minutes for silent reading. Then they reviewed what they read with a partner. I decided that if we started a book together and they KNEW that they would understand it that it might be more appealing to read on their own during a silent reading period.
I shot a little survey at them about the story so far and what they generally were interested in reading about in an ideal world.
Tomorrow I am going to ask them to tell me their favorite book/story, movie and tv show in order to get some plot ideas. The 4’s would like to write their own novels and if I ever get free time my childhood dream of being an author might actually come true. :o) Great minds think alike my friends.
with love,
Laurie
That’s what the New Houdini book is – a product of a bunch of kids writing a book together in class over the course of a year. They didn’t do a parallel novel to something like Pobre Ana, they just wrote the book from scratch. That could really be fun! And easy since all we have to do is ask the questions and input the sentences into the computer while keeping them in L2. Sounds so simple that it might work. But we’ll need some guidelines here. I’ll start tomorrow and we can check back in, those of us doing this, from time to time through the winter and spring to see where this goes. Or I could do that chapter on relative pronouns that my kids have been clamoring for these past six months. Hmmm.
Maybe it was the full moon? Just yesterday, kids did their “input homework reflections.” I have this awesome polyglot girl who LOVES learning languages. She read “Le Voyage de Sa Vie” last week and had the following feedback: “I was proud that I understood the book, and it was entertaining, but, from a writer’s perspective, they could have done so much more with the ending.” So, naturally when I started reading this thread I thought immediately that I should consult said polyglot writer girl for suggestions.
I would also love any info on process for trying to write one of these bad boys. Either in class or collaboration (yes to Chris!) or just because.. or whatever…would be fun to do 🙂
Kristy Placido did a workshop last year at NTPRS on writing novels. Her notes are available for download on the NTPRS site: http://www.ntprs.org/ntprs.org/Downloads_2011.html
(look for “Writing a Novel”)
But Robert’s advice above is about the best for where to start: in the middle, letting the characters develop without giving deep background. A friend wrote a book like that for my kids, and they were all asleep before the book could start, just like in Poor Ana.
The book that we’re in the middle of (well, finished edits today, I hope) started with the kid being happy because he was sure that the girl was going to talk with him today. Not quite as exciting as being in the middle of a soccer game. The reason I had kids write it was a bit prosaic: I decided that they wouldn’t write too far above the reading level of a first-year student. I told them to keep it in present tense, and we had to cut some of the adventures in order to vocabulary.
Last time we tried to do this, it was three years ago, in the second semester of my first year of TPRS. We figured out the story as a group, and then tried to write it as a group. For me, that didn’t work. Only a few kids were really interested in keeping it going after the first week or two, and the fact that I was there as automatic dictionary meant that we got way out of bounds on vocabulary.
Having an interested kid come up with the story line worked a lot better. We fleshed out the outline a little and figured out the characters a bit in advance. I forgot to have the kids give every character a quirk and a few basic endearing qualities (or the opposite, for the antagonist). That was something that whoever worked on the Stolen Head book told me: give everyone something that you can return to.
Once we figured out the outline of plot events, pairs of kids got those, and we went to the lab twice so that each pair could complete a chapter. It was a lot more efficient than writing the whole thing in the whole class. Then it was up to me to weave the chapters together a bit. There were some enormous holes that I didn’t see, but my first editor did. Then the kids read the whole thing again in pairs, trying to figure out where we could repeat new words. One kid was a genius at that…kept having the main character tell the story slightly differently to other people, or having him think back over the day. She got to be the next reader of the whole thing. Now she graduated early, so she won’t be around for the next one, but we’ve all learned from her ideas.
If we do another one (the next one we’ve begun but dropped for a while is about Peter the Great and a kid who does time travel every time he falls asleep in his history class), I will keep to that organizational pattern of setting up characters and general plot outline in advance and having the kids write it in pairs, with one overseer whose job it is to keep things more or less flowing.
One more place for getting ideas about how to prepare for writing a novel is National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org/educators). They have all sorts of pre-planning handouts for kids under the teaching resources.
Thanks for those comments on collaborative writing, Michele. I may try it with the level 1 reader I’ve started.
a kid who does time travel every time he falls asleep in his history class Talk about something in the air. That was the basic idea for my book that is now at the printer. It morphed into a time travel after an encounter with a gang. Each chapter carries the name of a knightly virtue and illustrates it in some way:
Courage: the hero goes to the aid of a student being attacked by a gang but has to run for his life; he winds up on the top floor outside walkway of a school building and falls
Humility: into the Middle Ages; he is hurt from the encounter with the gang and finds his way to a farmhouse, where a peasant woman takes care of his wounds but mistakes him for a noble
Temperance: eventually leaving the peasant family the hero overhears a plot to kill the emperor and must decide what to do
Loyalty: the hero finds someone loyal to the emperor and rides with him to help, eventually saving the emperor’s life
“Courtoisie”: the hero is adopted into the imperial family and learns to be a knight
Honor: the hero returns to the peasant family with a gift for saving his life and risks his reputation for the sake of honor
“Breeding”: accompanying the emperor on crusade, the hero shows his noble breeding by saving the life of a young poet (in a scene similar to the opening chapter but with different results) and then discussing his ideas
Steadfastness: despite the death of the emperor on the road, the hero and a small group arrive in the Holy Land and fight the saracens; during an attack on the city, the hero saves the lives of others by leaping to attack the foe
Discretion: and lands back in the present, where he deals with the aftermath of the original encounter and his time in the Middle Ages
This is really part of a grand plan. I have organized an entire semester of AP around this book, using it as a jumping-off point for discussions about the Middle Ages, projects (like building a trebuchet), and other readings. My syllabus has been approved by College Board. What I did wouldn’t work for level 1 by any means, but I used it last year with my 3-4-AP class, and they enjoyed it. A colleague also used it to great reviews by her students – she even had them read on their own.
Here are my favorite reviews:
“This was a huge relief from the usual read.” – Student
“It was well written and well thought out. It’s a fun story to read and I really liked it.” – Student
“I found the book to be very interesting. It didn’t contain that much vocab that I didn’t know but it had just enough so I was still learning new vocabulary while reading.” – Student
“Better than most books we’ve read . . . actually better than all books we’ve read.” – Student
Wow. I need to channel you.
Any way of making a simplified version for level 1? You got me at the word courtoisie. All of those high qualities, imagine, in something written in the world of today. The student reactions are the real indicator. The thing is that 80% of us probably deal with levels 1 and 2. Can you make this content happen for them? Or does it really need to have older kids with stronger language backgrounds?
I don’t see how I could write this story for level 1* – but maybe that is simply because of how I conceived it from the very first. When some others have taken a look at it, perhaps they will have ideas. In the meantime I will explore where some of my other ideas take me – hm, maybe the pirate book could be written at that level. German doesn’t yet have a pirate-themed book. Of course, it will be set in the North Sea rather than Caribbean.
*There is just so much that is not first-year vocabulary, even though it is high interest.
Hmm…I wonder whether one could do this with what the colors mean in Russian icons…love the knightly virtues. It’s nice to have a way of theming the adventures.
OMG! I have a buncha peeps at my disposal for this. Why didn’t I think of my National Writing Project homies??? This is wicked exciting! Totally with y’all on the “start in the middle of the action.” That was kind of the “golden rule” of a lot of the writing groups I’ve participated in. Anyway, I am hosting a writing retreat in early March with an awesome group, comprised of a first-grade teacher, second-grade teacher, a high school English teacher and a former kindergarten teacher/reading specialist. I will write to them beforehand and I bet they will give me some direction!
I had not ever thought of the points that Jody and Laurie brought up re: reading skills in general and how we assume a lot about our kids. Yikes!
Yes what Jody said about assuming things about reading really made me kind of fall backwards on my rear end and I had trouble getting up from that one. I put my arms out in front of me but I couldn’t get up. I keep thinking about what a shitty reading teacher in spite of that wonderful Reading Option A that took me ten years to create and test.
Nobody has ever set about as a group to network the creation of a small novel with certain features in a certain way for a certain audience. I love the North Sea angle – we have the German scholars on this site to finally make a dent in the disappearance of that culture and of Rome and Greece and of the great native cultures of the United States. The potential is there. We can do it through readers of the highest quality. I love the Hispanic culture, but there is no reason for one single culture to dominate a country as big as ours. So jen keep us informed about this writing project and especially about the “mdidle of the action” piece, which may be the golden key we need to actually produce readers that genuinely appeal to kids. We can come up with ideas that bring those cultures in because of their greatness. The greatness of those three cultures can find expression again. Stop, for a moment, and think about those three cultures. Now think of people actively using their languages – German, Myskoke, Sauk, Greek, Latin, Chickasaw, Euchee – to increase the overall quality of life on this planet. Do you see this vision? If it is to happen, then we need the readers. So, jen and Robert and any one else who wants to board this train, it’s “En Voiture!” time. And, since there may be a strong financial incentive to the author of these higher quality readers in the general, continuously expanding, comprehension based world, we can see where this discussion is probably best kept private from prying internet eyes. Just sayin’. Since many of us will be facing deep budget cuts in the future as teachers’ unions continue to be attacked, and some of us may lose our jobs, we may need to band together to produce actual products that add to our bottom line. It’s o.k. for teachers to make money, and, to be honest, those readers make money. In 2005 in Kansas City I asked Blaine privately how many PA copies he had sold – this was in 2005. He had sold 500,000, because traditional teachers use them as readers too. By now he has certainly sold well over 1,ooo,ooo. Even if he only got a few bucks from each copy, you do the math. We can do that too. If you are offended by the rise of a business mentality and a thread about selling things on this site, then I don’t apologize. (By the way, I have gotten advice on the monthly cost of this site and will soon lower it to a price that will continue to allow me to deter people whom I dont want in our group but will be more affordable for our group. The economy is not getting any better, our jobs are much less secure than ever, even as we continue to work harder and harder in the hope of a better, richer and happier life for us and our loved ones. If we can, on this site, work together to produce readers, books about Krashen based pedagogy like mine and other stuff that the legions of future comprehension based teachers can use, then why shouldn’t we do that? So far, Bryce and Jim and Anne and I sell stuff here. Why not you? And the readers is the big need. There are lots of reasons for us to work at getting better readers out there, and I say that we do that over the next few years. The stuff we create because we put our minds together here will be better. Honestly, it won’t be a challenge. The other stuff is crap.
Ben, while I am always looking for a bargain, I feel like I’m already getting one by just spending a little under $8.00/month for the privilege of participating in this PLC. I spend a lot more for a gym membership that I haven’t even used at all in the past year. If you have a little bit left over after you pay for all the cost associated with keeping this site up and running, then go out and buy yourself some bicycle gear or whatever floats your boat. You do so much more than provide a collaborating/venting/schmoozing platform – so, take the money (but don’t run, please).
Just my humble opinion.
Just a thought here, after 2 weeks with new groups of level 1 and 2 students, but I get so much mileage out of story readings that I can’t imagine not having them, even in level 1. I allows me to get more of the auditory reps also.
And lately, since putting up the illustrations kids make a la Dirk, I can get even more of it from the same structures and the same story, by discussing and writing what we’re looking at, adding new details and changing details if the drawings are bad enough to make us make up new stuff.
Sorry it’s late and this might not be too clear, but I’m just piping in to support reading at the lower levels, especially reading of stories we’ve created. It works for me. (But also easier for me to personalize readings, since I am in block classes and only have 3 groups.)
Yeah I hope I didn’t come across as knocking lower level reading. But, as you say Jim, from stories. Until we get our new great German and Classic and Native American novels. Also Jim your extended stories serve as good readings and I don’t have to even write them. Yeah. Reading connected to stories at lower levels until they can one day handle authentic literature. No snowplow type reading. We have enough snowplows here in Colorado anyway. And they are about as big as small houses.
On a side note to this amazing thread…
Happy Birthday Robert Harrell!!!
with love,
Laurie
Oh, happy birthday Robert!
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you, Laurie!
Auch von hier herzliche Glückwünsche zum Geburtstag! Hoch sollst du leben!!!
Vielen Dank, Brigitte.
I really agree. There is no compelling reading materials for beginners in French. And reading children’s books can only go so far. Same goes with music, I find it hard to find music with lyric that is compelling, appropriate and easy enough for beginners.
Michele’s plot described above about the kid getting stuffed into a trash can sounds good.
Not sure what thread to put this in, but this thread seemed the most appropriate. We had a pretty cool reading yesterday that I typed out. I had to take a personal day on Monday and on Wednesday to take our son to the doctor. So on Tuesday I PQA’d and did a class story with some new structures: has food, in his/her pocket, eats. I established meaning, did gestures and then for fun I showed a 40 second clip from Napoleon Dynamite; the scene where in class he eats a tator tot out of his pocket, a kid says “Napoleon, give me some of your tots”, Napoleon says no so the kid kicks his pocket, smashing the tots and Napoleon yells gross. I circled the structures and asked questions about the clip. Then I jumped to a class story. Grabbed a student, they had food in their pocket. Then, there was a monkey. The monkey wanted the food so the monkey yelled, jumped on the student and ate the food. This was all deliberate on my part because on Wednesday, in my absence, I had our guidance counselor come in to talk to my classes.
He used to be a Spanish teacher and he likes talking to the students about his experiences, how knowing Spanish has opened doors for him and he tells them stories from when he was in Spain. His most famous story (which is true!) is about going to the rock of Gibraltar with some friends. They brought peanuts in a backpack to feed the monkeys there. They unzipped the backpack and all of a sudden a big, fat monkey growled at them, jumped off of a fence and chased them down a steep hill. The monkey jumped on his friend wearing the backpack, ripped open the backpack, took the peanuts and ate them. True story!
So on Thursday, I simplified and typed out that entire story about his adventure and that was our reading. An interesting reading that they already had background knowledge on and it was a true story about somebody they know. Their homework was to go home and read the story to a parent. The parents wrote a lot of comments about how funny that story is. They’re also impressed at how much their kids are learning.
The PQA seems to be working. Are they getting in lots of yes/no answers to which you respond via the circling process to drive the discussion forward?
Just want to repost this from a comment Laurie made above. It’s not something to forget:
Reading works.
Reading works when:
The words become a picture in the mind/heart of the reader.
The reader cares about the material.
I just want to repost this bit from an earlier comment to keep the focus on Roberts’ book and the potential we have to work together to create novels that are of a much higher quality than we have now. I think of it as a good long term project for this group, which is clearly loaded with talent that could really help us get what we need for our reading classes:
…Robert … [maybe we can] add your novel to a new German materials list on the public access side of this site. And [we could use our combined talent to] get translations of French and one of Spanish, then go from there. On the self publication point, you could even go first with ebooks for group members before you even made the final three products available to Teacher’s Discover and all that, because if the book were in ebook form for purchase here, you could send out at no cost to you….
I might add that we best need not think about costs of producing novels and shiney covers and all that. I am certain that the group of teachers here, for example, want one thing right now – content.
And on the whole reading thing, don’t forget that we have an increasing army of readings being sent in and categorized, like:
He Talks Too Much (Matava) – French – Judy Dubois
These are readings that are proven in the classroom by group members and emerge from the story listed in the title.
I say this to widen our thinking to remember that there are more possibilities for reading classes than just bad novels and readings that we create from the stories we do, and that we can lean on other group members’ readings, especially if we are overworked or overtired or stressed at home or anything like that and just making time for things is a factor. (Luckily none of us fall into that category right now.)
So I am trying to think in terms of three, not two, sources of readings. And if we could move more to emulate Dr. Krahen’s style of finding sources of readings (directly accessing high interest readings from other cultures via a number of websites), then we would have a fourth source of reading materials for our kids, except probably not at level 1 in that case.
On his last visit I learned that Dr. Krashen himself is a reading machine in multi languages who is always getting books sent to him from other countries. That is, he models reading culturally authentic literature at level that appeals to humans and not necessarily at one age level. An example of sources for that kind of material is that great site BookMooch.com, which Dr. Krashen uses a lot.
So that is a fourth source of readings. We must keep all this simple, however. The new site design here – almost ready – is about simplicity and efficacy of access to information. We must remember that we are smack dab in the middle of an information explosion started by Krashen and we don’t want to be one of those rocks thrown out to the side of the explosion far from the real energy. We want to be in the middle of that. So that requires not losing site of
a. Krashen’s hypotheses.
b. Blaine Ray’s application of them.
If this site were allowed to continue going in its current direction with unregulated information it would soon become useless. If you have ANY thoughts about how the information on this site can be made more useful to you, please email me about that or just put it here as a comment. We are set to launch very soon so we need to make sure that we do the best in simplifying content here.
A couple of years ago Krashen did the keynote speech at the Ohio Foreign Language Association conference. He talked about FVR and said that when he goes to conferences all around the world people expect him to know dozens of languages, being a linguist. So to brush up on languages that are prevalent in the areas he will be traveling to, he reads. He said as long as you’re reading in the TL it doesn’t matter what you read. If you’re into romance novels, read a romance novel in the TL. I got a lot out of what he said during that speech. It really spoke to me when he said that he reads and reads and reads before traveling to brush up on the language.
I got a lot from K. talk about FVR at NTPRS last summer. Unfortunately while there is some stuff out there in Mvkoke. There isn’t a lot at my level. So I have spent the past year translating children’s books, board (or is that bored) books, etc. It isn’t very compelling to an adult reader. So I gave that up for the most part and concentrated on writing small diary entries. I still think there is a niche market for adult learners for easy books with adult content. I just haven’t got my head around writing them yet.
I’m now wading through a story collection in Mvskoke. Way above my level, but am using Bryce’s sustained silent reading mini-report to keep me on task with the words I don’t understand. It seems to help.
What K. said that was vital to me was to read anything you can. It is the process of hearing the language in your head as you read that makes the difference. So, with that in mind, I keep plugging at it and wishing that I knew more to write for others. But, if wishes were fishes we’d all eat fried food.
Kate–what is Bryce’s SSR mini-report? I don’t remember reading about that before.
Lori, go to his website blog… he just posted something about it