Bob Patrick sent this:
I had a little something unexpected happen yesterday, and it looks like something I will want to repeat fairly often. It just gave me another way to get comprehensible Latin into the ears of my kids.
I have a student teacher with me this year, and he is drinking deeply at the well of CI work. He was teaching yesterday, and using a set of embedded stories that I taught him how to make. The story was a good story, but rather involved, and so we have been taking our time with it. He asked me after the first class if it would be okay to ask a student at the end of the period to retell the whole story by him/herself. I agreed–if there were a willing student. I didn’t want anyone put on the spot. As it turned out, one young lady volunteered and did a great job. The class was spellbound – full attention, wide eyed and listening – to the story, one more time, only now told by a peer.
The next period he tried it again, but this time no single student was willing to go out on the limb. Then, one student asked: could two of us do it together? We agreed, and the two tag-teamed the story all the way through. Again, spellbound listeners.
I think that, toward the end of a story, when it seems that most in the room are understanding, this sort of tag-team re-telling is a good, additional way, to get that language in the air, one more time.
Bob