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NTCI is a System
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7 thoughts on “NTCI is a System”
Hi there, I have just joined this community and am new to it all. I am an Australian living in Greece and teaching English as a target language in a Waldorf school ( 1month in) I teach 1st class through to and including 5th class elementary. I have read PQA in a wink, and found it great, but have just read this article on Anats and it sounds even more appropriate for what Iām trying to do. I tried to google it to no avail, how can I find more information on how this system is delivered ( for an ever humble and excited beginner teacher)….
Any beginning teacher in this PLC gets free books. I just made up that rule but it sounds fair to me. I’ll send an ecopy of A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS).
Hola, Ben!
I like your “new teachers get books” rule. š I joined this PLC about a year ago and have been using TPRS but haven’t had time to fall down the rabbit hole, so to speak, on this page. I would love to have any book you’d like to share! I’ve watched some of Tina’s stuff on YouTube, and she makes it look so easy! I think my kids are a little bored with TPRS, and I would love to shake things up a bit. Show me whatcha got!
Good and this offer of free ebooks for any PLC members in their first three years of teaching holds true for anyone. Liz do tell me if you want TPRS instruction or NTCI instruction. It’s no secret which one I prefer and put the most stock in, but different people prefer different things.
I would suggest for TPRS the Big CI Book and PQA in a Wink. TPRS in a Year is still an excellent book for TPRS purists. The best stuff for TPRS is in the Big CI Book. Stepping Stones to Stories is another nice book, a kind of simplified Big CI Book for those who don’t like to read big books. Or I could send all four.
Best for NTCI is A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS) upon which A Natural Approach to the Year ANATTY is based, and also ANATTY itself – those two are big boys. I am disappointed that ANATS was not give the hype that ANATTY got because I see it as a necessary prerequisite to ANATTY, a kind of undergirding foundational book that is really the best thing I’ve yet produced, including ANATTY, which floats on ANATS.
Anyway, those two are suggested if you want to go the NTCI route. I would avoid mixing the two sets of books for obvious reasons. Just email me at benslavic at yahoo.com and I will send whatever you want. It’s like trying to drive a car in first and fourth gear at the same time.
Also, you or anyone else is invited to work with Julia in Texas on a project. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, here is the link:
https://benslavic.com/blog/julias-project-1/
Ben regarding the ease of using NTCI and images – Y’all know I teach 1st -4th grade Spanish. The 3rd & 4th graders started the school year begging to create a new One Word Image. So in mid- September I already had 6 images – 3 sections of each grade. Each of those classes lovingly developed fabulous stories about their image. We wrote them up, attached them to the images, posted them all, and did a gallery walk, after I did an initial oral overview of each plot.
Then each group wanted to dramatize the story. With their ‘help,’ I converted the narrative to Readers’ Theater. We acted out each story – with several different casts – so each story was filmed 2-3 times. I kept riding the wave. The classes begged to see each others’ videos. Then they begged to re-enact each others’ stories. Here we are 5 weeks later and we’re finally going to take a break from the OWIs because next week is the lead up to Halloween and I promised we’d do Halloweeny stuff. Meantime, the 2nd graders saw all the images hanging on the walls of the Spanish room, and they wanted in on the action. So those 2 group just finished creating their OWI stories, too.
Now I have 8 total. One is a giant orange Halloween donut with black sprinkles and vampire teeth named “Dunkin'”; and his frenemy, a slice of pizza with worms and dirt on it named “Wormsy.” In the end of that one, Dunkin’ is a poor sport and when Wormsy beats him at soccer, he drinks up all of Wormsy’s tomato sauce with a straw and then eats him with his vampire teeth!
Yes, I get paid to do this.
…the 2nd graders saw all the images hanging on the walls of the Spanish room, and they wanted in on the action….
This is the way it’s supposed to work. Why promote your program when the kids can do it for you? Even though I’ve been doing OWIs since 2005, I didn’t introduce the galleries until 2016 in India and I immediately noticed then that I didn’t have to worry about building interest in my program up anymore – it happened naturally precisely bc of the galleries. Kids from other classes even would want to join the classes of their friends bc they got into certain images.
It is details like this that, when people haven’t read ANATS, prevent them from seeing the subtlety of Invisibles/NTCI/OWI. It really is a very tight system, and not all that loose TPRS stuff. Out of ignorance (French verb ignorer means to not know and has no pejorative connotations), people keep doing those old types of stories that are so nervous.
Thanks Alisa, and for sending me the images you describe above. Later I will try to get some examples posted here via photo/downloading for this thread here, so people can see what your kids have done.
Before we turned it into a Readers’ Theatre, we also did a 6-panel storyboard. We came up with the summary statements together; then I wrote in the captions and they copied from under the doc camera; then they illustrated the panels; then we viewed all the papers.
And some classes also did a Listen & Draw on dry erase boards. I have a video of a guy drawing a similar image – say a piece of sushi with cutie eyes (artforkidshub.com) – and I kinda Movie Talk it – but then the kids add the particular OWI attributes – an angry hairy unibrow, a looooong beard, etc. and everyone shares the image they drew by raising their board. Some are so attached to the character that they beg to draw on paper in color – we haven’t done this yet this round – and some surprise me with artwork they did at home!
BTW -with any whole class kid artwork that becomes of it -have them write a favorite part of the story below (copy from the storyboard captions?) and make a bulletin board in the hallway – maybe even post the BIG ORIGINAL OWI, and a brief layman’s explanation of the ‘project.’ This has the potential to gain lots of evaluator points; gets the word out to parents and community about the fun and real language in your classroom; and injects much needed levity into the schoolhouse!