A repost:
Q. I started CWB with my first years (2 classes/week) and because I didn’t have the hang of it, it lost steam. I changed to a bit of TPR to keep energy levels up but realize that I really need to complete CWB. How would you recommend I restart it?
A. You don’t need to complete all the kids now. It can last as an activity you revisit all year long.
CWB loses steam because:
– it doesn’t have any steam in the first place, the kid is boring, in which case you make nice and move on to the next card.
– as a teacher new to this kind of work you need more time to get the art of extending scenes. It’s not hard; it just requires practice.
– the CWB activity was created to personalize and serve as a vehicle for norming the class on the Classroom Rules (see poster page) and jGR. If it doesn’t turn out to be a big wonderful thing that is just fine. Use it to personalize – it can go on all year for that as I mentioned above – and to set the rules in place. At that point you can move on to more reading, stories, and the other things we talk about here. A good place to see some of those other activities is by clicking on the post from last year entitled New Two Week Schedule (2013):
https://benslavic.com/blog/new-two-week-schedule-2013/
That is a very useful article indeed in terms of planning out how you do your instruction over a two week period.
Here are a few recent posts on CWB – they might help:
https://benslavic.com/blog/ccwb/
https://benslavic.com/blog/training-video-2-cwb-2-2/
https://benslavic.com/blog/29025/
There are others that you can look through in the CWB category for other ideas. In the past we would go right into stories from CWB but I think that is a bit freaky for some people. The goal is not stories and I will be writing about that here in the next month. One thing you can do is move right into reading when the CWB energy really does die out. What you can do is focus on reading after CWB and before stories, right about now in the year. How?
Just write out every little bit of CWB information you can, whether it is one sentence on a kid or if you got a kid’s card into an extended little scene. Use a superstar kid to write notes on what is sais in class and go write it up (it only takes 5 min. per class). Then the next day just do R & D or cRD (see categories) on whatever you create for a reading. THEN you can go to a dictée (also described in the categories or elsewhere on this site). And you can also textivate it (see category).
What we do in this work is simple. We create some auditory comprehensible input and then we write it up for them to read and the we do some dictée or textivate with it. Simplified, the order of effective comprehensible input instruction is:
we talk
they read what we talked about (we make it about them and they like that).
we talk about the reading (we make up even more stuff about them, increasing their desire to read about what they did)
we do stuff like dictée and textivate connected to what we originally talked about and what we read about
after awhile we pick up a Blaine or Carol novel and we read it because we can after all that comprehensible input (I don’t target stuff but a lot of people do – I hope to make the case in the next few months here that targeting structures and doing stories is not necessary; we can do it if we want but we don’t have to – we can be perfectly effective at comprehension based instruction without stories)
we rinse and repeat
During all that we do a Quick Quiz each day. When we have done CWB to the point that it really loses energy, and when we have packed a lot of reading in between the cards, with quizzes and plenty of classroom management work, our classes are ready for stories, usually around November if we want to do them. At least that’s one way to do it.
https://benslavic.com/blog/ccwb/ https://benslavic.com/blog/training-video-2-cwb-2-2/ https://benslavic.com/blog/29025/
The future of this work is in reading and non-targeted comprehensible input.