This is a passage from a rewrite of the Ultimate CI Book that I am currently doing for Teacher’s Discovery:
If you worked diligently through the Ultimate CI Book 1, building tableaux from student cards, etc., you may have noticed how each questioning level (QL2 through QL4) requires only an image plus some “starter” sentences to get it going.
It wasn’t that complicated, but then we started to wonder, “How here in Book 2 am I ever going to do a story? I’m ok with tableaux, but stories…”?
Let’s talk about that by first reviewing how we mastered making tableaux in the first place in Categories A through C. The point that I want you to appreciate here is that it wasn’t very difficult to make tableaux.
QL1: N/A
QL2 – WHO:
QL2 using Student Cards: a student card plus one sentence is required (“Class, Josh grows tomatoes….”).
QL2 using One Word Images: a class-created drawing (OWI) plus a few phrases are required – the phrases are built from up to seven OWI prompts (“…a big yellow apple is sad/happy, etc…”)
QL2 using Individually Created Images: an individually-created drawing plus six prompts start us off (“A penguin named Pingo works as a tour guide….”)
QL3 – WHERE:
QL3 using Student Cards: (“Josh grows tomatoes in Idaho….”).
QL3 using OWIs: (“…a big sad yellow apple in Colorado Springs….”)
QL3 using ICIs: (“A penguin named Pingo works as a tour guide in South America.”)
QL4 – WITH WHOM:
QL4 using Student Cards: (“Josh grows tomatoes in Idaho with the ghost of John Paul Jones”.)
QL4 using OWIs: 1 phrase required (“…a big sad yellow apple in Colorado Springs with Zasu Pitts…”)
QL4 using ICIs: 1-2 sentences required (“A penguin named Pingo is in South America with an eagle.”)
This breaking down of the first four questioning levels in the Create phase (QL2 – QL4 is always the creation of only the tableau) shows us that in order to get from QL2 through QL4 very little information – just a few sentences – is required to finish any tableau.
Why am I highlighting such an obvious point? It is because many of us, certainly myself before the Star came along to alleviate all my fears about comprehensible input language instruction, have often found ourselves fairly comfortable with building a tableau, but then the thought of actually building a story from it caused us to experience fear.
We often felt afraid that a story wouldn’t happen, that it wouldn’t be a “good story”, that tableaux are easy but stories are hard, etc.
My aim in this next section of the book, then, is to show you how simple the story-building process really is, and how if you just understand that fact, that very few sentences are really needed to create a good story, you will be able to do stories, and do them well.
Then you can stop using the readers too early, which has become a normal thing in CI circles these days but is not the right thing in the first semester of level 1 CI classes.
You may want to go to Teacher’s Discovery at this point in this discussion and watch a podcast I did on this topic with Charles Verhey about how you can provide more interesting comprehensible input to your students in the form of listening before going – too early – to readers.
You can do stories without any trepidation and with a lot of confidence that really good things will happen in your storytelling classroom if you just understand a few things about what storytelling really entails – how easy it is.