Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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Elementary Question
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7 thoughts on “Elementary Question”
I teach elementary. For their stories, I take pictures of my whiteboard at the end of class and use that to quickly type up the general story when I get a moment. The stories are usually pretty short, so it only takes a minute or two. I organize my stories in folders in Google drive, so before I go to a class, I can quickly open up the story and review it.
Also, for the characters- are you talking about the Invisibles ? Or an OWI? I’ve done Invisibles with 4/5 graders, but not younger kids. No real reason; I just haven’t. I generally just pick a picture that speaks to me that day and try to incorporate another one or two of their characters into the story. But I tell them we’ll be doing this all year, so they just need to be patient. For OWIs, I let them give me ideas and then I just pick one that I think I can draw. I do the OWI a bit differently with the littles, as we talk and create the character and then I write up a description and they all draw it during the next class.
Slowly a group of elementary teachers who adapt the Invisibles to their younger kids is forming here, led by our Alisa. But I don’t understand (as the creator of OWIs and the Invisibles I’m allowed to ask), how is it that they are considered different things?
Maybe I am misunderstanding the terms, but I had the impression that Invisibles were characters created by the kids themselves (as in, here’s a piece of paper. Draw a character) and OWI was a class created character. I treat them differently because I can go to the story right away with the picture on the paper. For the class-created character, I have to do a class describing the character and I may or may not ever get to a story with it.
Thanks for clarifying. The way I understand it, the Invisibles are both individually created images AND one word images.
I haven’t tried Invisibles in my 1-4 Spanish classroom cuz I only see my kids 3x week for very limited minutes so the bigger thrust is using as much TL as possible, and Invisibles starts with English to get the ball rolling.
THEY LOVE OWI. It allows me to maintain the communication/input in the TL. It allows more control in the classroom – which is a huge issue for elem Ts – we don’t usu suffer from kids asleep or heads down – we often have very excitable and distracted but energetic issues…
I do both Individually Created Images and OWIs with my 2nd-5th grade classes, depending on the self-control of the 2nd grade class. For the younger kids I mostly do OWI because they’re never happy with their own drawings. As we get older I use the Art For Kids Hub YouTube channel to walk them through a funny drawing (usually with sound off and I narrate in Spanish what the artist is doing) and we just change the faces / background to reflect each student’s individual answers to the biographical questions for the ICIs. Sometimes my 5th grade students have had enough practice that they can confidently draw an ICI in the time period allotted without AFKH’s help, but usually not until later in the year.
Our building is slowly transitioning from songs / games / grammar to CI, and many students are used to just being able to sort of space out / sort of sing for 30 minutes (PK-2nd grade block time) and it’s a big adjustment to 50 minutes (3rd-5th block time) of mostly CI where they have to pay attention.
Even after we get some quality characters it’s tough to get to stories with some of my classes, due to the drama / lack of focus that a lot of our kids have. We’re an urban school in St. Louis, and there are a lot of needs not being met in a lot of ways, so much of what we do in our language classes responds more to the SEL needs of the students rather than language needs.
The sense of calm camaraderie when we can create the character is great for the kids, however. I had an admin come in and observe my class today as they were drawing their ICIs with the help of YouTube and normally I would change my activity and get into something more “academic” when they come in but today I just didn’t have it in me to change the energy. I was worried that he would object to it, but he liked it, and his only critique was the same as always – I didn’t have my objective written on the SmartBoard.
I wish I had a big container where I could take some of these ideas about elementary and just throw them in and turn the handle on the side of the container and a book comes out.