Sometimes I get really lazy. Or perhaps it’s just a normal response to a world where people work themselves like mules and then wonder why they collapse.
Whatever, below is my so-called “Fast Fourward” activity (because sometimes I want to fast forward my class and have it end when it feels like it’s just supposed to be starting). So this post describes how we can eat up minutes and make the class fly by when we don’t feel like teaching.
Some of us, just upon reading this, might feel guilty. (Been there. Don’t want to repeat that insanity. It’s the “I’m-the-best-teacher-in-the-building” sickness.) What I offer below looks like real work, though:
1. SSR 10′ plus 5-10′ of follow up translation discussion Just take any text that any student read during SSR to start the class, plop it on the doc camera, and start translating. When that gets boring, do another one. Eats up minutes.
2. Have them translate, in their composition books, a random sentence that you make up. You can stretch this out to where you are half way through class or more by the end of this second step of my Fast Fourward activity. Write the correct version on the board in the TL. They fix what they wrote, you walk around the room, faking teaching.
3.Do Sabrina’s greetings activity. Cake. Eats up even more minutes. You’re going around the room asking the same question, playing off what they say.
4. if there is more time to eat up on this day you just aren’t feeling it, just make some more cake using Dictee. It can be a paragraph of the SSR read that day. More and more cake. I just have to keep a napkin in my back pocket to wipe my face and keep the students and any observers from seeing that I am eating so much cake in class that day. You are eating instructional minutes up without actually having to think.
And they think they are learning, because in half the activities above (2 and 4), they are writing and to them and any observers writing equates to learning. (To them, not to us who know.) Do this tomorrow if you feel like enjoying some early Christmas cookies – and cake.