Good afternoon Ben and Tina,
I wanted to thank the two of you for the CI professional development you led this summer. I attended the seminar in the Philadelphia area (I was a literature teacher of six years, and this is my first year switching to teaching high school French), and I received some coaching from Ben as well (during the seminar).
My approach is that of a combination of traditional classroom and CI. I teach both French I & II, so I was particularly mindful of your statement about starting slowly with French II students who haven’t had previous exposure to your approach.
Given that, I was delightfully surprised to find that my French II students were even MORE excited about the One-Word Images than were my French I students. It was as if I was giving them something they’d been asking for, but hadn’t the words to ask it.
The One-Word Images and their accompanying characteristics have been going over marvelously well. I’m especially impressed by how the specific moment of the classroom becomes a part of the characters. For example, in one class, we had a large tiger on the floor. One student yelled, “A tiger!” (I guess she doesn’t like them), and right then, I just had the idea to say, “Shh! It’s sleeping! And you made him open one eye!” and my students just fell right into imagining it along with me. The entire classroom full of students began whispering. When one student returned from the restroom and spoke at a regular volume, they chastised her to whisper and pointed at the large (imaginary) tiger in the front of the room. The class takes place right after lunch, so somehow the story grew so that the tiger had missed lunch (he’d been serving a detention), and so, even though he was happily asleep, he was VERY hungry, so we oughtn’t wake him. The students played into it perfectly.
Today, we were working on adjective endings, and we were plodding through a worksheet that seemed to torture the students, so I decided to shift gears and do a spin-off of the One Word Image to help teach gender agreement for irregular adjective endings. At one point in the class, we were surrounded by three imaginary turtles, one of which was standing on top of a hanging light in our classroom and spitting on the heads of the two boys underneath, explaining why both boys were inclined to wear their hoods up, even though the teacher (I ) had asked them to remove their hoodies. The class (including the two boys wearing the hoodies) were loving it.
Thank you again. It creates space for marvelous creativity in the classroom, and, each time we do One Word Images, stories, or a blend/spin-off of them, I see the students relax and lose themselves in absorbing the meaning of the words.
Best,
Amy Garcia