I just found this unpublished and now completed draft that I wrote in January of 2016. It was about the same week that I first started developing the Invisibles concept. Kind of a blast from the past to read that shows how the concept of working only from images and not words got going back then:
Sometimes we get into such fun using CI in our classes that I can’t believe that it is happening. Here is one such example:
One of my 6th grade classes has created a bunch of “Creatures Who Live in this Classroom”. We now make stories out of them alone – I don’t try to teach the language; I just try to teach them about the images and the entire language comes along unconsciously for the ride. (This is how Krashen says we acquire languages, by focusing on meaning and not the vehicle for its delivery – the entire process happening in sleep after each day of CI.)
The kids are much more into it than in the first semester before I went down to Kerala. Now, when we start the story with characters like this, there is a different level of buy-in that I have seen before in all my years of doing TPRS/CI since 2001.
Click on the links below to see one of the earliest Invisible characters stories develop, Pringle Man. Actually this set of videos may provide the very first complete Invisibles story that takes the process all the way through to the reading.
The reader currently working through ANATS or ANATTY will see how these videos evolved into what is in those two books: