We may be working from a list of verbs provided for us by our district WL leadership. Or not. It doesn’t matter. Another point, and one bound to irritate some people: in my view the order of teaching the verbs to our students doesn’t matter. If a verb is high frequency it will occur a lot – you will end up teaching it by June.
I am just saying how I am going to do it. My goal is to teach the nails out of at least 50 verbs this year. That’s it. That’s what I want to do this year. That is my Scope and Sequence. Everything else, all the men on the side of the room or rocks in the dump truck, if you read those earlier posts, will take care of themselves.
I’m going to start my first class with the verb “looks for”, spending lots of time with it, getting massive amounts of repetitions on it. I will be an archer shooting hundreds of arrows into it. Later in this series of posts I will be much more detailed in how I am going to do that than is reasonable. In fact, it will be over-explanation on steroids. The reader can take what they want or throw out whatever they don’t want.
Each time I teach a verb this year I will spend at least a half an hour on it. At least. Once I feel it has gotten enough reps (I don’t say “has been acquired” because I don’t know what that means), I will add it to big sheets of butcher block paper or big post-it notes that surround the top parts of the walls of my classroom. If a verb makes it up on the Verb Wall, I know that it will have been repeated in many forms in many ways in my class, that’s for sure. Did you know that that verb tense right there is the future perfect, by the way? I just wanted you to know that I knew that.
(The topic of how many reps on a verb can be confusing. In my CI world, I make this decision intuitively. There comes a saturation point and I know I can’t work with that verb anymore and it is time to move on to another one. That saturation point will not occur until I have gotten at the verb least 300 reps on it, perhaps, reps mostly in the form of auditory input but also in the form of reading as we move deeper into the year.)
All the reps allow my students to be able to identify more readily, more quickly, gain ownership of, the verb when it spontaneously comes up in future classes. My thinking is that if the verb is up on the higher part of the wall and it comes up in future classes I can refer to it quickly and the students can make the connection and we can move on.
(I will need the laser pointer to point to the growing Verb Wall because I am not as tall as Sean, but I won’t use the laser at sea level as I mentioned here a few days ago in what I think is a super important point about how lasers speed our pacing up, to the great detriment of many of our slower processing students.)
I like those terms by the way. Sea level is where we teach. The verbs, our greatest ally in our CI instruction, are there in the clouds, available to us when we want them as long as they have earned the right to be on the Verb Wall. They will rain down into the class and make our jobs easier this year, growing our CI gardens.
Verbs are great! Many of us don’t feel that way – they make us a little uneasy – but that is because of the way they were taught to most of us when we were in school. We need to let go of that feeling that verbs are somehow shitty little things and realize how great they really are.
I like verbs. Verbs like me. I can get over my earlier schooling in languages and be a part of making language acquisition more fun for people. That would help others. That is a career worth having, I feel. I can recover form high school, is another way to say it.
I am in recovery from high school. Don’t tell anyone. That’s the real reason I teach.