What is this work really about? It’s about laughing with kids. If you spend your time in class laughing with kids, and it’s in the target language, you will probably end up by the end of the year having taught a nuclear explosion amount of language compared to what is possible in what you were doing before.
When you are laughing with the kids, you are certainly not laughing about the structure or the form of the language, or its single word lists and rules, but about its content, the message, its contextual richness, its groupings of understandable words, bigger and bigger each year from word chunks to sentences to entire paragraphs to entire stories, what Rabelais calls the “substantifique moelle”, the bone marrow of something.
It’s the freedom from fear and worry that counts – freedom from the fear that you won’t teach all the words, the words in the lists, and that they’ll “find out” that you’re not a very good teacher.
You have the capacity to be a very great teacher. Proof is that you are venturing into territory few venture into because of the insane demands made on teachers these days and the clinging claws of the old paradigm.
It is so easy to turn your teaching into robotic performance. You must stay strong and never give up trying to align in the real way with the standards and the research. This is your task in the new 21st century paradigm of language instruction.