Robert has a great idea. I could see a real strong pool of lesson plans coming out of this:
Hi Ben,
I did something in class today that I have done before, but thinking on it later today, I came up with an idea I thought I would run past you as a possible PLC collaboration.
First, what I did today:
I am working with Ann Matava’s script “Afraid of the Package” and was talking about “What are you afraid of?” Naturally we covered the standards: Snakes, Spiders, Clowns, etc. Then we moved on to teachers and other people. For the last part of class – about 20-25 minutes – I showed a scene from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and did some movie talk using “afraid of ______”. The scene takes place in Professor Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class. He is teaching students how to deal with a boggart, which appears only as the thing you fear the most. (Otherwise no one knows what they look like.) The first student up is Neville Longbottom, who is afraid of Professor Snape, so we covered “of teachers”. Then comes Ron Weasley, who is afraid of spiders, so we covered that. Next is Parvati Patel, who is afraid of snakes but uses the “Riddikulus” spell to turn the snake into a clown/pop-up jack-in-the-box, thus covering a couple more fears. Finally, Harry Potter steps up, and the boggart turns into a dementor, at which point Professor Lupin steps in, and the boggart becomes a full moon. (Lupin is a werewolf.) That allowed me to talk about dealing with unreasonable fear in real life, what people are afraid of and why. All of this in German 1.
The idea I have:
Perhaps we could come up with a database of scenes and short clips to do MovieTalk with Ann’s and Jim’s scripts. I will set up a document on Google Docs and share the link with the PLC, then people can share information as they think of something or come across something that will fit. It will look something like this:
Matava #1
Story Title – Afraid of the Package
Structures – receives a package, is afraid of, doesn’t want to open it
Video Source – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Identifying Information – Scene #11; Professor Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts Class: boggarts
available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doxxfXqpKYA
Robert continues:
I’ll put it into a table so that things don’t get jumbled. After I create the document, I’ll share the link. Until then, people can either comment on a thread or send me information in an e-mail. When I have a good number of matches, I’ll share it more broadly.
I don’t know how this fits into the current discussion of targeted vs non-targeted CI, since it starts out using structures from story scripts, but it definitely comes down on the side of true communication in the “communication” to teach grammar vs grammar to facilitate communication discussion.