This is a note to myself re: planning through to Xmas break and I post it here for anyone else who might like me be getting wigged out by too many things to do in the vast universe of CI strategies at our disposal:
I will continue with stories, which is all I have done since August, with great response from my classes and great reading gains because of ROA.
But I am going to also introduce:
- a new novel, but only for twenty minutes a day (85 min. block.). And I will use Compact R and D instead of the snow plow reading technique with those novels. I also love what Laurie said here recently about not feeling like we have to finish novels and offering them to those kids who want as part of FVR. What a great idea!
- I’m going to do some MT, but since I don’t feel that confident with MT (nor do I feel confident that MT, unless seriously reined in, is that effective – the last thing we want to do is go out of bounds on our kids), I will first make a reading of the selected video clip. We will read the story that I write first, and the kids won’t know it is leading to an MT video clip until we then talk about the clip. As I said above, I don’t like to show content that has not been prepared first, that is not 100% comprehensible to the kids, and perhaps writing up the MT clip first and reading it before showing the clip will help. (I will make the reading below their level, as all reading should be in my opinion. If this idea works we have a new warehouse to build as with vPQA PPTs. It will be a warehouse of readings in various languages of MT clips, for those like me who would like to read the MT content before showing the clip and digging into it with our big circling scythes.)
- Of course with five “interview” strategies – houses and pets added in by Angie and Robert lately – how can I not explore those? But time is a factor, there never is enough of it in a CI class.
- vPQA. I love vPQA. I don’t do nearly enough vPQA. I want to do more. We have a basic set of PPTs right now even though the idea of vPQA is not getting a lot of attention right now. I believe.
We’ll see what happens as we move up to Xmas. After that, I suppose many of us will do much less stories, since the kids naturally tire of them in about February, and more reading. Spring is the time for reading activities*. Of course, they don’t have to be chapter books. We can read anything we create in class. That’s why our story writers are so valuable to us.
(On that point about not forcing too many stories on kids over the course of an academic year, letting up on them as the months go by, I remember that Annick Chen actually didn’t let her second year students do stories at all, all year. Then, when they came back to her in third year Mandarin, she was able to rip the stories all year. I thought that was pretty clever.)
*Spring is also the time for the summer conferences and for seeing each other again. We’re all summer campers and we will have all grown another foot into CI adulthood and maturity. Can anyone say Agen 2016?