How true are the statements below? I need feedback for a Bite Size Book I am writing on activities to start the year:
We only do “extreme staying in bounds” and avoid sliding any new untranslated vocabulary by the kids for a few weeks into the academic year. Once the students have activated their brains to what it feels like to learn a foreign language, we can start bringing the message in a bit wider form, without translating every thing on the board via Point and Pause. The time for heavy pointing and pausing is only in the first two weeks of the year.
It seems to me that this is a good interpretation of the research.
(This is when to introduce Story Listening, after those first few weeks. Their brains will know exactly what to do with it then. So I advocate Questioning with Cards (formerly Circling with Balls) and One Word Images at the very start of the year as proven and very solid activities to get the year started, but Story Listening should be put off for a few weeks before we bring that particular big bad boy out to wreck havoc on the kids’ language ignorance.)
But Story Listening should be put off for a few weeks before we bring that big bad boy out to wreck havoc on the kids’ language ignorance.