About ten years ago Anne Matava and I started a rich conversation about best practices in this work. We agreed on everything and we still do. Then, when I saw what Anne could do in creating story scripts, I asked her to write what eventually became three very fine volumes of story scripts that some teachers in our community have made into entire curricula and used for years.
As we continued our discussions through the years, Anne and I only separated our approach to (then TPRS) CI once. That was on the topic of how to start the year out to set up the scripts, which we both used all year, every year for the past ten years until for me this year in India, last January, I started developing the new Invisibles idea. From time to time Anne would send scripts here and we all would share them. There must be at least thirty of her scripts hiding in these pages going back to 2007 that have been used thousands of times by PLC members.
My approach throughout the past ten years was to start the year out using four strategies that I created between 2005 and 2007: Circling with Balls, One Word Images, Word Associations (just a special way to use TPR) and the Word Chunk Team Game. Anne , on the other hadn, always started her years out with her Questionnaires, which she invented at exactly the same time I came up with the Circling with Balls strategy in 2005.
After having the time lately to really study Anne’s questionnaires, I have concluded that they are a better way to start the year than the four things I have been doing all this time. The way Anne breaks down the process of starting the year by simply getting to know the kids by asking them simple questions, is now in my view, the very best thing to use at the beginning of the year. I will post that information from Anne here tomorrow.
Specifically, knowing what I do today, I would suggest the following process to set up stories as unbeatable:
The questionnaires set up the one word images which set up the stories in the form of (a) Anne’s scripts or (b) Story Listening (Beniko Mason) or (c) Invisibles (me). We make our own choices about which of them to use throughout the year. We throw in plenty of reading classes using my Reading Options.
The previous sentences illustrate and define a 24/7 struggle that has occurred in my deeper mind about what best practices really are in this work we do. So I put them in green and in bold letters to punctuate what a big statement the above one is for me as I have run and walked and crawled and gasped and stalled out and prayed heavily through the past fifteen years trying to learn how to best reach all of my kids in my French classroom.