This is a suggestion for the teacher who is finding that stories are not working right now. The suggestion is to experiment with some little one word images at the beginning of class.
It is often true that stories fail because the students understand far less than the teacher thinks. That is always the first thing we need to do when looking at why things are not working in a CI class, after, of course, our enforcement of the Classroom Rules and our use of jGR.
We always have to look into our kids’ faces and see if they are understanding, and then slow down and get back in bounds and give up our pride in how well we speak. We have to go slower and stay in bounds and target fewer structures, and learn what it really means to work on one structure at a time for as long as it takes and only after we see them understanding that structure go to another.
How many times have we said this over the years? We have a structure and we teach that structure. We don’t teach the language in general because the kids can’t hang on to that much language. Go read this again for a refresher on this most basic aspect of what we do:
https://benslavic.com/blog/what-do-you-want-to-teach/
One word images are valuable because they are simple, but it all depends on if the class wants to help you. So what I do is ask the students for help by asking some of my superstars in the hallway before class to help me build these images, to try to inject some creative energy into them. I often ask my students for help. I just tell them that I am thinking of going back to the textbook because the class has been flat lately and will they help me?
This work is all about making the input not only comprehensible but also interesting/compelling, and one word images can sometimes do that, if the kids are on your side. I love the energy they bring to the class. (See category on One Word Images here for details about OWI if you are not familiar with them. They are underutilized as a bail out tool).
This is an article from 2008 – published here on Nov. 3 in 2008, exactly six years later, to show how little this work really changes – about how OWI can get things going in a class because they bring ownership to the CI process:
Today, to start a class, the kids chose a word from the big word list on the wall. It was “pen”. We quickly created a big black pen with an IQ of 200 who was sad because he didn’t have any ink.
What I learned that was new for me was that, had I thought of it, that little fun warm up activity could have easily linked right into the story script I had chosen for today! Why? Because there was such a high level of emotional attachment to the pen that THE KIDS had created.
A story about a boy or girl is less interesting than the same story about a pen that the kids had made. And, like a story, it is easily acted by students. Instant higher interest! No longer are stories limited to being just people. The actors can be pens and pencils, and even pencil sharpeners and, what a thought, staplers! A whole bunch of classroom objects walking around the room. And won’t that please the district badges who consider such words important in languages, when we ourselves all know they are important merely in classrooms, and not even….
My story script for today – Anne sent it to me – was about a kid who told his mom he was constipated in order to get out of a test at school that day. What if it turned out that our pen wasn’t really out of ink but was really just constipated?
Wedding the one word activity to the story is just a thought at this point, but worth messing around with next week. My heart felt happiest today when we were all talking about the pen instead of trying to make the story work, which is a serious amount of sweat no matter how long you’ve been doing it.
If I could find a way to blend some of my PQA activities right into a story script, it could create a paradigm that would make beginning teachers more comfortable, because many new teachers get nervous when starting their first stories, whereas, using this idea, they could just bail out at any time and go to some other simple activity, and build them and their students over time into real stories.
It would be a good thing to offer new teachers a kind of TPRS program based on simple TPRS skills, to get them out of the gates in a relaxed way. Word chunk team games, one word stories, and other PQA activities could maybe take some of the stress out of learning TPRS. We need to make this learning curve easier for people. We need to find ways to take the nervousness out of it. Because when teachers are nervous in trying to get a story started, it goes straight to the kids.
