For those who have started stories, or who will start in January, remember that we fuel stories through humor. Now, this does not mean that WE have to be funny. I’ve not met many kids who see their teachers as sources of humor. Rather, THEY are funny, and what they say is funny. So develop that.
We have this most important advice from Blaine from about 2003 from the moretprslistserve:
…I believe people who are the most effective at TPRS don’t tell stories. They ask questions, pause, and listen for cute answers from the students. The magic is in the interaction between the student and teacher. TPRS is searching for something interesting to talk about. That is done by questioning. Interesting comprehensible input is the goal of every class. If we are there to tell a story, we will probably not make the class interesting. We will be so focused on getting the story out that we won’t let the input from the kids happen….
So don’t focus only on the various techniques and skills if you are starting stories this month. They are not enough. When you carefully allow into the story the best cute answers, you will learn something about storytelling – everything will be contained in the faces of your students. They will smile in a way that reveals that they find the details emerging in front of them amusing. There will be bemused smiles. Then you will know something, and you will be encouraged.
Let’s be very clear about why they smile. It is exactly why people smile when watching a good funny TV show or a movie. Viewers get into a kind of quiet world and become very focused on the show and forget their surroundings. They get focused on the meaning of what is happening. All you are doing is following your script.
It is in the script where the humor lies, and so then when you personalize it to your classroom via all the details you get, it just becomes funny to the students. Look for those focused smiles – this is how CI works.
For many of us January is the height of the year for stories. We do personalization activities to build to stories in the fall, we build up to real stories with shorter ones/extended PQA in November and December, and we read a lot more novels in the spring when kids are burnt out on stories from the winter.