Q. In Circling with Balls, what do you do if there are five kids in the same class who play basketball?
A. This has happened to me. I just make each one of them the best player in their region. I can teach geographical expressions that way. Each athlete has a region or a maybe a country that they are the best in. Connecting a place to a student is a powerful aspect of the overall personalization process that we use in comprehension based instruction.
Another thing is to compare the five players to major stars in real life, but never with each other. Leonard who plays basketball better than Tim Duncan is the best player in the Western Conference of the NBA and Landen, a guard, plays better than Eastern Conference guard Deron Williams of the Brooklyn Nets. Leonard is the best player in the West and Landen is the best player in the East. Leonard is never better than Landen; students in any activity are always better than someone not in class. You can see, just from the above discussion about only two students who play basketball, how rich the discussion can become very quickly, with so many facts that you could spend a week just talking about those five basketball players. It would be a good use of time.