Now let’s take a look at how Category A works, where in the Create phase we make a character from a student’s card in the Card Talk activity and then take it around the star to a completed journey.
Category A – Creating a Tableau from a Student Card
Category A/Sample Journey 1 – Henry
CREATE PHASE
Our first sample journey uses an activity called “Card Talk” to create an image of a character, who in this case is an actual student in your class. In this activity students write their names on name cards with a picture of an activity they do or something they like as a way of initiating discussion about them.
For example, in one class your student Sarah, whom you have never met since we start this activity on the first day of class, writes her name down on the card and then perhaps draws a picture of a book because she likes to read.
Another student, Antoine, who likes to skateboard, would write his name down and next to it draw a picture of a skateboard.
Printable downloads of the templates for doing Card Talk are available with instructions in that section of this book.
The cards provide the first activity of the year for your students as well as the first images for our journeys around the star. Later in this book, we will use other kinds of student-created images for this purpose, but the cards are the first.
Remember that to complete a journey around the star all we need is some kind of character. This character starts things off in the Create phase and then is expanded upon in the following four phases of the star sequence to complete a journey around the star.
When we use Card Talk as a basis for a journey, the character “created” is the actual student whose card was chosen, as we will see below in our first sample journey with our student Henry.
We use four basic “questioning levels” when we work with the cards in Category A:
Questioning Level 1 – The Town Meeting
Questioning Level 2 – Who
Questioning Level 3 – Where
Questioning Level 4 – With Whom
The levels are like cairns, piles of rocks that are placed on mountain trails above tree line to indicate where the trail is even in deep snow, so that you get safely to your destination at the top of the mountain.
The four questioning levels above happen during the Create phase, functioning as guides in the creation of the character, giving it form. Abbreviated as “QL” throughout this book, the questioning levels allow us to relax and experience far less stress when making up questions so that we can enjoy the process of creation of the tableau – and later the story – with our students.
When we use the questioning levels, we always know that things will work because we always know what the next question we need to ask is.