At first the One Word Image is amorphous and undefined. All we know is that somewhere in this space in front of the room, a cat or a car or a slice of pizza exists. The fun is in learning its particular details. The students will bring the object to life by responding to a series of questions in class, discussed next.
Like any good storyteller, we want to develop the characters inside and out. The physical portrait of a One Word Image is developed in class as a group. It is a pleasant process, full of creativity, ideas, and fun. It builds group cohesion because we negotiate the details together. The emotional portrait is of equal importance. It is developed after the physical portrait, sometimes simply in an exit activity at the end of class if time is running low.
For the sake of the student artists who will be drawing the character, it is important to establish details of the character’s physical portrait by asking the rst four questions of our questioning sequence in this particular order:
1. Quantity
2. Size
3. Color
4. Happy or Sad
The artists need to hear these things in this order to quickly sketch out the character. Often time is short, especially?in the beginning of the year when there is so much more need to clarify meaning—to repeat, to gesture, to write on the board, to go slowly, to pause and point to words— and so many more interruptions due to teaching kids the Classroom Rules, explaining to them how their “showing up” in class will be connected to their grade, etc. In that case, we can rest assured that even these four simple questions will be enough to result in memorable characters that demonstrate some originality and personality.
How can four simple questions elicit a memorable character? A lot depends on the manner in which we speak to our students. First, we must speak slowly, far more slowly than we think is necessary, and then we need to take the speed down a notch, even from there.
If we sense that the class is willing to continue and engagement is still high, we can also add some of the details listed below to truly personalize the character even more. Of course, we need not worry too much if we don’t get to these additional questions when building the One Word Image. This is because the students often end up brushing up their character during the story creation process that usually occurs the next day (except in block classes when it happens in the same class period).
7. Age and Name
8. Favorite Number and Color
9. Likes
10. Dislikes
11. Family and Hometown
12. Job
13. Catch Phrase in L2
With questions like these, we do not need to wear everyone out with massive numbers of repetitions in one day, because we will be hearing and reading the same common L2 expressions in almost every story all year. Since they accumulate day after day as they are needed, the repetitions do not seem at all mechanical, contrived, or boring to the kids.
Moreover, I know that my students will encounter the newly emerged structures again and again later, as we review the artists’ work, as we recycle and do retells, and as we read the written text using the many reading options presented later in this book.
The fact that each image is unique to only that group of students is a very good thing. The stories are the unique creations of each class, something to take true ownership in, since they were built from the bottom up in a collaborative, cooperative storytelling experience.