When we start out the year we need to make sure that our students know the rules and how they will be graded. We need to make certain that our students get practice in knowing how to function in our comprehensible input classroom before starting full stories.
In the Big CI Book, I have discussed some strategies for starting the year to prepare the ground for stories: Circling with Balls, Word Associations, the Verb Slam Activity and the Word Chunk Team Game. Now let’s look at a fifth and better way to start the year and prepare the ground for One Word Images and the invisibles.
The Anne Matava Questionnaire has actually been used for some time in many storytelling classrooms. Its greatest feature is how it bonds the teacher with her students and getting everyone in the classroom to know and trust each other to a higher extent than anything else I have ever used.
Here is the questionnaire (Anne – if this is not what you are currently using please advise):
Name:
______________________________
Nickname(s):
______________________________
______________________________
Name(s) you wish you could
have:
______________________________
______________________________
Job:
______________________________
______________________________
A job you would like to have:
______________________________
______________________________
Any interesting or unusual
facts about you:
______________________________
______________________________
A celebrity you find attractive
and why:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Favorite musical
group/athlete and why:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
A pet and their name:
______________________________
______________________________
A pet you would like to have
and their name:
______________________________
Something you don’t like and
why:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Something you don’t have but
really want:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Some unusual thing you have:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Talents/abilities, however
strange:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Someone or something you
fear and why:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
Weird chores you have to do:
______________________________
______________________________
______________________________
A food you don’t like:
______________________________
______________________________
Best Friend’s name:
______________________________
Your favorite store:
______________________________
Anne describes how to use the questionnaire:
“The most important thing to remember is that each of us is an individual, and we will each practice this method in our own way. Here is what I have come up with, after about ten years. I always encourage people to find things that work for them.
“I believe in starting the year with simple things. I start with one fact about each student in the room. The questionnaire asks for information about their families, pets, sports, likes, dislikes. I have the students fill this out on the first day.
“Then, each day I take one fact about one student and share it with the class. We talk about it for that class period. Examples:
Suzanne plays soccer. She plays well. She plays for the American national team.
Danny has a brother. His brother’s name is Hayden. Hayden is 5 years old. He is annoying.
Isabelle has a job. She works at McDonald’s. She doesn’t like the job. It smells bad at McDonald’s.
“These are actually the very beginning of stories, but the students don’t notice that. They are too busy trying to understand what I am saying about them.
“All the while, very intensely in the first few weeks, I am training the kids in Ben’s Classroom Rules and giving them preliminary grades on their performance in class a few times a week using a rubric like Mike’s.
“As the kids acquire a bit of language, the details get longer, with more detail. I always type up what we have, and read it with the kids the next day. Sometimes with a quiz, sometimes with a dictation.
“The primary purpose is to welcome each student into the class and find out something about him/her, to begin to create his/her identity in the class. The secondary purpose is to build a repertoire of very common language from which to work going forward.
“By the time we have gone through every questionnaire, at least in part because discussing all the answers of each student would take all year, the students have acquired a lot of expressions like has, wants, needs, goes, likes, sees, says, eats, drinks, plays, etc. Now they are ready to start either using the story scripts or working with the Invisibles, which both use the same principle operating in a different form.”
Here is an example of how two pieces of information provided by two boys in one of Anne’s classes became a story. The information given was that ‘Chris plays bass guitar’ and ‘Big Boy sings’.”
Chris plays bass guitar in a band. Big Boy sings in the band. The band is called “Mr. Rogers’ Band”. It is a gospel band. Big Boy sings in Pig Latin. The concert is in jail. Mini-Me is in jail because he is too short. Mini-Me cries and dances the Macarena.
I asked Anne to elaborate on the above:
- How long do scenes like that take to create?
- That little scene probably took about one 40-minute period, very early in the year.
- Do you work with two kids per class like this for three academic weeks (15 classes x 2 kids)?
- The two kids per class thing is not carved in stone. With music, it was easy to find two kids and put them in a band. When I talk about what someone likes to eat, for example, I might make it only about them. I don’t really know going in. Normally I start each class having chosen one fact about one kid from his questionnaire. Sometimes others get added in, sometimes they don’t. Three weeks is not long enough. It’s more like four to six weeks.
- In other scenes, do you get into more or less detail than in the scene you described above?
- The amount of detail is about right. Maybe more as time passes.
- Is it possible to get a first silly name for a kid from this activity?
- A silly name? I never thought about it. Why not?
Notice very importantly that Anne said this: “I don’t really know going in [what will happen].” This is huge. The teacher who succeeds with comprehensible input must be willing to give up teaching a preset body of information (always boring to kids) and instead work with information that the kids make up (always interesting to them).
Anne concluded:
“I call the use of the questionnaires my first quarter curriculum. It’s easy to write a curriculum guide with it. Students will be able to tell where they live, how old they are, what they like, etc. Sounds just like the old textbook days, doesn’t it?”
What usually happens is that the students don’t initially take the questionnaires seriously because they see it as an assignment for school and not for what it is, an honest request to find out about them in a lighthearted way. So after handing them in without really caring what they wrote, when the students realize that you really want to learn about them and talk about those things in class, they ask for their questionnaires back and give you honest answers. This is an indication that they are starting to take your class seriously because they are seeing it as really about them.
You probably are going to want to write up the little scenes that get created as you ask questions. Present them as readings the next day. This is a great way to reinforce prior learning and to set the foundation for more complex reading later. Because of the previous day of comprehensible input, they will be able to process the reading based on the sounds that they understood during class the day before.
While things are being discussed, artists can draw as per earlier discussion in this book. They can draw what is being discussed and in that way we can start out the process of “interviewing” the students for the job of artist even as we start with the one word image process before starting stories.
As stated, all through this process, the students don’t even consciously notice that everything is in the target language, as per Krashen’s position that only when the mind of the student is focused on the meaning and not on the individual words can real acquisition happen.
Once when using Anne’s questionnaire my eyes fell on A Name That You Wish You Could Have, in response to which a shy student had written Her Majesty. Instead of just being a cardboard cutout in my class, this student suddenly and wonderfully became “Her Majesty” and after a few more questions “Her Majesty the Dancer”. I felt humbled to be able to call her that, and the effect was that a previously shy student took on a kind of regal air in class. This kind of thing happens in comprehension based classrooms.
So the questionnaire can bring important personalized details about a student into play much faster than when we use other starting the year activities.
If you learn that another student, Catherine, has two horses, whether it is true or not (lies are encouraged on the questionnaires), you can develop that fact into all kinds of imaginative personalized comprehensible input over the course of the year to greatly strengthen Catherine as an important member of the class that year.
You could ask Catherine questions about the horses: which is bigger, what are their names, what color they are, which one runs faster, which one Catherine prefers, etc. You could make them really big or really small, teeny weeny horses. If you spend an entire class period asking her questions about her horses, as Anne recommends, Catherine would be happy to answer all of them.
If you are a middle school teacher, expect lots of horses and cats and dogs and narwhals that are rainbow colored and whose first names are usually Bob.