The opening of a story – that PQA – can really drag things into too many details. Especially when I first started doing stories, I remember that I would get caught up in adding too many cute details.
It’s just so much fun and we are having success, so we keep adding details until half the class is over and we realize that all we have so far is a girl with 73 red and blue polka dots on her really big blue shirt that she found in the basement of the Englewood Wal-Mart on a hot day in the afternoon in July of 2009.
At some point we need to get the horse out of the corral and get to some verbs and to some locations and into some action, into making the story script come alive. We may even think about completing a story (I know, I know….).
Nina Barber – here in Denver Public Schools – sent me over a simple idea this morning that may be of significant help in propelling the action of a story forward from the beginning, enabling us to avoid the “too many details” syndrome. I would like to share it here.
Here is what Nina said [ed. note: bolding mine]:
From our conversation last Friday about beginning a story:
Il y a un garcon qui s’appelle/There is a boy whose name is…
My new beginning is:
Il y a un garcon qui vole (chante, va, aime…)/There is a boy who steals (sings, goes, likes…)
Do you realize how many more reps we can get of a key verb this way?
My answer is yes. I tried it today and it worked. The technique Nina suggested blasted all my classes into action. Thank you, Nina. I’m going to regularly start stories this year in this way once this early part of the year period of rule setting and personalization has been completed.
Of course, I will continue to go with the funny details – they are important – but the shift in thinking, the growth, is that I will be in command of how many details get into the CI; adding details won’t drag me through the class until I wonder where the class time went.
By the way, this example from Nina of instant email collaboration between all of us in Denver Public Schools gives new meaning to the term “learning community”. Now that we went to Los Alamitos together, and as we now move into more into the all-important trust building phase of our work together, and as we invite each other – for real because we want to – into each others’ classrooms, we will no doubt make good use of district email processing of how best to do CI.
We won’t have to even wait until we are together (once or twice a month we will do that). Like this morning everybody on the DPS TCI team (Teaching for Comprehensible Input) got an email from a middle school teacher, Jessi Sandschaper of Morey Middle School.
Jessi was asking for ideas about how to teach the subjunctive! Very cool! Imagine – a middle school teacher introducing a story and one of the target structures is:
“You must be (on time, etc.)!”
And no.. kids don’t shouldn’t need to wait years before they are exposed to [what we perceive as] complex grammar. It is not complex grammar. It is just normal speech, no more easy or difficult than anything else, if perhaps less common in how many times it occurs.
In fact, sheltering grammar hurts our students’ acquisition. If they don’t hear the real language spoken in a natural way – in all of it’s exquisite potentialities – from the beginning of their studies, echoing what Jody said in comment here today, then how are they going to learn it? During a four week period in their fourth year of study of the language? That has memorization all over it, and that is not what we who desire to make Krashen’s vision come alive in our classrooms are all about.
Yes, the exquisite potentialities of language. It’s beauty. The fun. The honoring of kids so that they really want to come to class for a laugh or two and some language. I mean, let’s not hold back on them. Would we, in a music appreciation class, blot out certain of the more fervent, longing, difficult arpeggio laden sections of the Brahms Violin Concerto because the kids couldn’t understand them?
Thank you Nina for this great idea. It’s a keeper, at least in my classroom.