I just wanted to share what I did one day last week. I put up an image of a city by a river (projected through the LCD from boston.com the big picture) and talked about it with my level 2 classes.
It felt really good to reinforce words that I thought they knew from level 1, and of course I found that they hadn’t really really acquired those words, like sky and boat and water and clouds and sunset and words like that.
I was amazed at the power of the image to convey meaning. I had worked with images before in class, but didn’t fully grasp their power to produce great CI then. This is certainly because now I am able to:
- stay in bounds where before I was all over the place, out of bounds almost all the time for about ten years. But now I stay in bounds.
- insist on a strong response of one word from the entire group all the time. Before I didn’t have the strength of character to insist on a strong group choral response.
Now that I can stay in bounds and avoid weak class responses, I can enjoy working with images a lot more.
Now there’s lots of high energy with the images. More clarity of the CI than ever. It’s the in bounds and the strong response factors, but it’s also the image itself as a unique tool to help create CI.
In my opinion, something strange and radical happens when kids are focused on an image when the teacher is doing CI. It’s not nebulous like in a story or in PQA. The picture is right there in front of them. It’s easier for the students who have had their imaginations beaten out of them in school.
It helps when the images are beautiful. The kids seem so grateful and excited to connect L2 sounds with images. I will explore using Google Earth to talk about Paris next week. Can you imagine? I know people already do this. But just let me write it out here so I can come to a greater understanding of it anyway, since it is new to me and my own classroom.
Of course, you can’t let the water leave the banks of the river or you will have a flood of too much information. And I have noticed with this work with images more English coming in as well. So gotta really enforce jGR with this.
An equally big deal is what Blaine and Von have always told us to be wary of in class – weak responses. That is huge! No weak responses. Constant one word yes/no/other word strong responses must be happening as we have discussed so much here.
I call this working with an image “L & D” – Look and Discuss. Two distinct advantages of working with images in this way are:
- working with images reinforces vocabulary previously taught in other settings.
- working with images forces us to speak in simpler sentences, since we are not trying to say things with only target structures, which creates longer, more complex, sentences.
To repeat, whenever I do CI with pictures the quality of the instruction is better than with stories, PQA, reading, any of it. I would bet that our attrition rate among teachers would be lower if they first worked with pictures/images after the beginning of the year activities than trying to start right in with stories.
You can also get good writing practice with L & D this way. If you feel that the kids are getting overwhelmed with too much vocabulary, you can just stop and have them take out a sheet of paper and, referring to the board where words have been written down during the discussion, have them write three or four sentences to hand in as an exit ticket.
They do so easily because the discussion was so much simpler than in stories. Or you can go to dictation. Or play with Textivate using the words from the discussion, although you then have to remove the image to project the Textivate material.
James Hosler pointed out that this is a lot like what the kids are asked to do on the AP exam, and when they do it at level 1 it is very much like that, so we can call it a pre-AP strategy if adminsitrators want to hear that term.
Here are the steps involved in L & D, which is basically a one day template to do auditory CI with practice in writing. We can do it all week, with one or two or even three images per day, or we could throw it into a block to beef the block up at any time. We could do as much or as little using this template as we wish.
The process:
Here are the steps involved in the above if you want to try this for the entire class period. And don’t forget that this strategy is easily targeted to writing:
- Go to The Big Picture – Boston.com, Google Images, or somewhere like that. Pick out an image that contains some vocabulary that you would like to teach your kids. Here’s a good place to go for good pictures: http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/photo-caption-002
- Frontload the coming CI discussion with that vocabulary, establishing meaning in the same way that we set up stories in the first part of PQA. Offer no more than four new terms. Too many terms and you lose the kids. We always limit vocabulary and offer tons of properly spoken language (grammar) to our kids.
- Discuss the picture in the TL, using the Punch List from the categories list here to guide you along through the class.
- Be happy if you only get five sentences all built around the few words you started with done in twenty minutes of slow circling. You will see something happen – there will be crystal clear comprehensible input happening all over the classroom.
- With ten or fifteen minutes left in class, ask the kids to write what they can remember from the L and D discussion. They can refer to the words on the board and the other posters you may have up in your classroom to help them write.
- If time allows, put a few writing samples from what the kids just wrote up on the doc camera for general classroom discussion using R and D. Do not correct the grammar. Why waste time?
- Collect what the kids wrote. Use them as a grade if you want. But if you are under stress, toss them. Remember that you don’t have to grade everything that you collect.
You can also use your Quiz and Story Writers – see Jobs for Kids (162) – as you normally do in stories. This is especially useful if you have a block. Without a block, you have to choose between a quiz and the writing sample you ask them for. The information provided from the story writer, of course, turns into a reading as a follow up the next day.