This is new information about CWB and OWI as of August, 2013. It discusses the importance of simplicity in the first few weeks of any school year.
For a review of the basics of CWB and OWI, go to the TPRS Resources page on this site and click on Workshop Handouts. You can also search and read in those categories here, for various points not made on the TPRS Resources/Workshop Handouts pages.
Most of us try to add too much information to CWB and OWI in the first weeks of the year. Remember what the real purposes of CWB and OWE are in the first two weeks – to absolutely establish classroom discipline and to personalize. In order to do that in the best way, we must limit new sounds and get as many reps as we can instead of going shallow and wide on each kid.
If Johnny likes to skate, it is enough to just find out what color his board is, where he skates and with whom. Same with the one word images – what color is the bird, what is its name, where is it? That’s plenty.
Try to establish any more information than that and the kids get badly confused and then you are tempted to go off to your pity pot and sit and think how bad you are at CI, when what is really going on is nothing more than you are giving them too much information, far more than their brains can handle as novice language learners. They aren’t loving it because they are confused, and that is the only reason.
Many of us get so excited when we start the year with these super powerful personalization activities that we forget that they are being used not to teach the language but to set up classroom discipline – via jGR and the Classroom Rules – and to personalize as stated above.
Therefore, when we limit the questions to three, four at the most, per kid, we can go around the entire room and get to every kid within the first two weeks, and then, with the discipline and personalization pieces in place, we can recycle, start adding new things to each kid’s “verbal portfolio”, start extending out some PQA (see Workshop Handouts), start making little scenes involving different kids, getting the kids up and acting nice and early, and even see some stories stories develop as early as September.
The questions that hold the most power and therefore the ones to ask in the first few weeks are Where? and With Whom? Don’t ask the wrong questions at this point in the year in CWB and OWI. Ask:
- WHERE
- WITH WHOM
Those are the right questions.
Of course, you refuse boring answers. Once the skateboarding kid is on the moon boarding with Justin Bieber, you leave that kid doing that activity and go to the next kid. Everybody knows they are up there. It is like all that new information about each kid goes into a kind of collective unconscious for that particular class, a fun bank, if you will.
Over those few weeks to start the year, as you learn each kid’s name, what they do, where they do it, and with whom only when doing CWB, you leave the kid skating with Justin in the moon. Bring them back into some extended PQA or a story whenever you want all year by simply making a withdrawal from the CWB bank whenever you want.
So, hold off on the details in the first two weeks. Start they year with your main focus on what counts – discipline first, personalization second, limited bizarre facts about each kid third.