Here is a valuable set of well-matched verbs if you want to start out the year with a super mini story. I know that they are well matched because we used these verbs in coaching at iFLT last week in MN and they worked for new people. They are from Linda Li:
(This is more important for me than CWB. These verbs will last for approximately the first week of school and they will help me accomplish a lot, most, of everything I want to accomplish to start, norm, set up, the year. CWB later in class, ten min. max to end class, is what I am going to try out.)
has (probably plant a Pepsi in front of a kid who wants to play)
wants
gives to him/her
As usual in the first most important days of the year, while teaching these verbs, I will also be norming the behaviors all the while as usual, while having six students working to build the feeling of being on a team facing together towards SLA, all of us (three to count structures, one to write the story up, one to write the quiz, one to draw), possibly with the metacognitive piece happening toward the end of each class since I like to close the early classes talking L1 with the kids about what they just experienced in L2.
These three verbs have power and are interesting and support each other. They will truly engage the students. Then I will end each class with CWB in the last ten minutes of class to break things up and get to know the kids and work some more on laser pointing to the Classroom Rules (which have changed this year as per John Piazza for those who were in on that thread last spring).
The background on First Story 1 is that I went to all of Linda Li’s sessions one summer at NTPRS and each day I carefully studied how she presented these three verbs. She went ever so slowly! We just can’t go slowly enough! It makes such a difference for the kids. Put it this way, go ten times slower than you think you should, so that it hurts, and then slow down some more. And don’t be nervous about the fact that you don’t have a story line. You don’t need one with certain verbs – some verb combinations generate energy all by themselves and those are the ones we want to use in super mini stories. They work on first days and that is why Linda uses them at national conferences. Also very powerful are looks for and finds.
So at the start of the session – this was in 2011 (St.Louis NTPRS) I think – Dr. Krashen was sitting there with his coffee – if Dr. Krashen is not there then just work with a student. Linda, already in slow motion with a very happy kind of look on her face – one that signals that she is just enjoying herself – goes around the room using the verbs in this order:
Dr. Krashen has coffee.
Circle it. Everybody looks over at Dr.Krashen who sits there with a contented look on his face holding this huge Vente from Starbucks. Linda milks this. She doesn’t go flying to the next sentence. She hangs out with this image of Dr. Krashen sitting there. People cannot help but start to smile. They smile through most of the entire two hours of this. It’s awesome and what makes Linda the best. I went to her session every day that week because I wanted to see the source of the magic. I saw it. It was in her sense of mysterious play in slowed down time – a kind of slow motion – and it was all about one thing – Krashen holding coffee. That coffee will become the subject of the entire session.
Next:
Skip (sitting across the room toward the back) looks at Dr. Krashen.
She circles it, same as above. She points to a pre-prepared list of all the words she needs (question words, etc.) to make each sentence comprehensible, since this is not her own classroom. They are on those big sticky note chart paper things on the wall behind her.
Then:
Skip wants coffee.
Circle it, etc. etc. Don’t use a laser pointer. Walk over to the word and put your hand on it and say it and give the students time to digest the L1. Lasers speed things up, I have noticed.
Next:
Dr. Krashen gives Skip coffee.
The coffee goes to Skip’s hand via the group, who now have ownership in what is going on. The time goes by in pleasant harmony without a word of English except the visual translation input from the charts behind Linda. Linda spends this time just enjoying herself, and, since she iss enjoying all this, so is everyone else. She stays in bound, always using only those words and never going out of bounds and never speeding up so that the input is 100% comprehensible input the entire time.
Once as a joke during the session Linda brought in a fluent Mandarin speaker from a Chinese university who told the story way too fast and the expressions on the faces in the group – I saw this – went into a kind of mild horror look as their affective filters rose like thermometers on a hot day. Then she explained the joke to the relief of the class.
When this session is over, I walked around the rest of the conference thinking in Mandarin half the time, as, from time to time, the verbs in the TL jump you like bandits from your unconscious mind. You may be talking to Laurie Clarcq and bam the word for gives in Mandarin pops into your mind. That’s the (underrated in my view) Din.
So, since we want to start the year with the best comprehensible input, we may want to consider this for our first day back in the fall. We could do this on the first day of class and then do the “he loves her” story (see First Stories category) next. And wecould be doing the CWB cards/questionnaires for ten minutes at the end of class, right after we give a quiz on the story.
If we go slowly enough and enforce the rules at every turn, laser pointing to them, personalizing our classroom, we will have a fantastic year with trained kids (as I said often last week in St. Paul – we are animal trainers) who know and like each other and respect every word that comes out of your mouth, 95% or more of which are in L2.