Sometimes we just need to get to the end of the year. There is a “Bail Out Moves” category but some of those posts are about TPRS and dated so they all may not be relevant to what we are doing now.
But here is one idea that is a good way to eat up some days at this time of year:
When a class is reticent to speak, to engage, simply because they smell June around the corner, you can make them write a little story for the first ten or twenty minutes of each class, then collect it, and during your planning period make corrections or suggest areas that can be changed.
Then hand it back to them the next day, put them with a partner if they want, and let them combine their text with that of their partner. This will kill many minutes on the second day – they like to do that and, after four or three or four such writing/revision class periods in a row, they end up with a cute little story, in their opinions.
Then just take those stories and one by one put them on the document camera, and the class translates them together with the me laser pointing at the words. I always ask for clarification from the author – they become a kind of expert and it creates more CI. Really, I am using their text as a basis for CI, always testing the waters for a story, but really testing the waters to see how effortlessly I can make it to the end of the class period.
Since the text was written by one of them, it is naturally more interesting to them than anything I could come up with. Talk about whatever comes up. Use as much English as you like now at the end of the year. Just burn the minutes talking about their text. Again, the whole point here is that they are naturally interested in stuff they create.
You can riff into weird stuff during the discussion. Like one day we were reading a text by a kid about a girl with a real shrill voice. I went right to the obvious – who has the most annoying and toxic voice in the world. Then, when that loses energy, there is more text on the overhead to return to, or if the text is over, another one is waiting in the wings from another group, who also want their story shared with the class.
Having their own text right there in front of the class, written by them, seems to make a difference in interest level. That’s the point of this post.