K continues her reports:
“Some of the kids that I do stories with at lunch are at the point where they can do a 5 minute freewrite, and so we do 1 everyday. Normally, they just write and then a few share what they wrote, or see if I can read it. The other day, I had a girl who kept writing and writing for about 20 minutes. When she finished she asked if I would read it , but not out loud. Amazingly, I could read every word!
“I saw the blog about kids writing/helping to write stories. Another kid asked if we could do a biography or part of a biography of a student or famous person as a story. I’m having trouble picking structures for these bio-stories. Any suggestions? Things are wonderful for me now at school, at home , and in French. Everyone is learning so much . I don’t think I can ever thank you enough for what you’ve done the past 2 years. It has truly transformed and opened my world and I find new possibilities as a result of that every day! THANK YOU!!”
K you are welcome. Of course, it is you, something in you, that has responded to this way of approaching languages. Many people, who are not to be faulted, would rather judge this stuff before getting to know it. You sat in my classroom for a few years and “got” it. The piece that I see loud and clear in all of your posts here, which we all so much appreciate, is the fire to blaze into new things. Without that fire, there is nothing. I like the way you said that you could read every word of that freewrite, without saying anything about spelling, etc., which you know comes later, once the language has been used, heard, chewed on, and, especially, read enough. When you said that you could read every word that the student wrote, you honored what the student could do and did not criticize. I did ask Dr. Krashen about the structures, picking structures, what to focus on, etc. and he said he will get back to me and I will definitely post his response here. In the meantime, it is so truly bizarre, this picture you have painted of getting all those people, teachers and students and even students from Spanish classes, into the lunchroom of your school and just playing off each other and slamming new ideas into the mix to see what happens. Isn’t that the sort of thing that we as Americans do, since the time of Lafayette and Washington? Just seeing these ideas playing out in the form of happy people learning, smiling, appreciating each other as people, and not feeling stupid because they can’t conjugate some double stem verb correctly, is an honor, and, of course, we want to keep up with this saga as it plays out through the rest of the year, so keep the lunch reports coming!