I was working with a Chinese teacher on the last day of the conference a few days ago, and she chose to work with:
looks for
finds
These two words are powerful together! I highly recommend them to anyone wanting some guaranteed success in their first week of school next month.
By the way, I am now thinking that CWB should be limited to the last ten minutes of class and be used no longer than 15 minutes in any one class period. Work with one card per day, stretch one card over weeks if you want (if the energy is there), and the entire process of CWB and the questionnaires on the reverse side of the cards can be stretched out over the course of the year.
I remember in the past that people would say that the cards, which I had recommended that we use intensely in the first few weeks of the year to personalize and get firm classroom management (more important than teaching the language because without those two things you can’t teach the language) in our classroom first, that the class got flat with the cards and my response was to spin spin spin the card into a story but it was not a good answer. New people who are just trying to keep their nose above the water don’t need to be told to spin a CWB card in the first week of class.
So the new advice from me is to use the cards/questionnaires at the end of class (which also guarantees that you end class on a very high note) and then before that, use super mini stories, of which the two verbs above are the best combo of any two SMS verbs I have ever seen. Do lots of embedded TPR in the super mini stories.
Exactly how to use those two verbs, looks for and finds, will be described here in detail at a later date. I learned a process in MN while coaching people that is fantastic.
One point to make to explain the power of these verbs is that, if you think about it, those verbs are emotional opposites, so we can say them in a way that reflects their meaning when we establish meaning. To be specific, when we establish meaning for searches for, and we have kids up doing TPR acting out searches for, we can say searches in the TL with a sense of urgency, a sense that something is wrong, because we can’t find something! Then, when we establish meaning for finds, we can say it with joy and relief. We should remember to do this, emote and taste the verbs, whenever we establish meaning, if the verb allows it. Again, more on this later. But try those verbs out at least in the first month or so if you decide to start the year out using SMS*.
*For more on this, search SMS or super mini stories or look in the First Stories or here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/super-mini-stories/
https://benslavic.com/blog/super-mini-stories-2/
My thinking now for the first few months of the year is less CWB, more SMS, less formal TPR and more embedded TPR (all that means tome is when you are doing a SMS story you just TPR the heck out of the verb throughout the SMS), more Word Associations if you teach middle school kids (I heard more than one compliment on word associations in MN), so that CWB takes a back seat to SMS stories in the first months of the year until they evolve into real stories a bit later in the fall. I plan on working with Tripp and Matava scripts more this year as well.