Whenever you are doing CWB/OWI or whatever else you are doing at this time of year to set the rules and personalization pieces in place, keep in mind that when things drag, you can always move to another activity. You don’t have to keep everything auditory, even if your students are brand new to the language.
Blaine invented the best instructional sequence of all time of
1. first establishing meaning, then
2. creating something from the meaning that you established (in TPRS it is stories), then
3. reading what you created
That sequence can apply to Circling with Balls or anything else. It is the DNA of this work.
So if you find out by looking at Jenny’s card during CWB that she reads (meaning established) and then use PQA to find out that she reads in the park with the Burger King guy in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday (something created from the meaning, a kind of really short story), then you can read/write to change the dragging energy into something new for the kids to break up all the CWB auditory input that has occurred up to that point. Kids cannot typically handle auditory input for more than 20 minutes anyway.
So a class sequence might be:
1. Establish meaning (Jenny reads)
2. Create something (all the details with the Burger King guy and all that)
3. [Brain break when that drags – 2-5 minutes.]
4. Turn on the LCD or doc reader and write it out while they copy it down (level 1 classes) or while they take dictation of the newly created text (level 2 and above).
5. Once you have created the reading either by them writing it out or you writing it out for them, read it. Use Reading Option A (ROA) for that.
5. Return to a new card after the writing/reading and start the tripartite sequence again.
In other words, don’t get bogged down with endless auditory discussion in the CWB activity. Apply it to writing/reading. When the energy drags, write and then read what was created earlier.
This tripartite sequence is not really a lesson plan. It is a sequence. Sequencing lessons are better than creating lesson plans because sequences aren’t bound by time. A sequence can last one class period or less – just ten minutes even – or it can last three weeks. It all depends on how the kids react to it, how much energy is contained in it, how much energy is held inside any one discussion.
Keri Colwell has created a really good CI sequence that includes free writes. We worked on it together last spring but I delayed presenting it here because I wanted to wait until people would really apply it now in the fall instead of forgetting about it over the summer. I need get that published here as an article. Keri if you read this remind me and let’s get that published here. The way Keri sequenced it is really good and you are going to like it.
Another advantage of sequencing lessons is that the old kind of lesson plans weren’t contiguous. They didn’t build off the same information (Jenny reads) but jumped from one thing to another, which is very hard for the kids because they don’t know the language. Building the whole class off of just one structure instead is very brain-friendly language teaching.
Of course, there are all sorts of little things you can do in between the three basic elementals described above. The brain break mentioned above is an example, but you can also throw some Textivate in there, or something with the interactive whiteboards, which is the big find of the summer for a lot of us although some people like Kristen were doing them last year.
Here is an example of a two week program with all sorts of little in between things you can do. It was posted years ago and I know it works because it got the stamp of approval from Carol Hill who to my knowledge still follows that extended sequence of activities.
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/two-week-plan/
There is also a collection of good articles on scheduling/sequencing your classes here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/schedules/