In the same way that we can create Card Stories from the Circling with Balls cards, we can also create Reading Stories from any little readings that we may have lying around in our classrooms. Instead of using the cards, we use these readings. The concept is the same – we get something and create a scene, a little story that we create with our kids on one day, and then, on day 2, we read the actual passage with our kids.
What readings? Any readings. I have an old book of basic readings in French. There was one reading in the book about a guy who works in a hotel and shows a room to a guest. He goes in, opens two big windows, points out that the bathroom is next to the room, gives the key to the guest, and leaves. That reading is about fifteen lines long. It’s worth two full classes of CI with a grade thrown in for good measure.
Why? Because I didn’t focus on the reading first, getting all bent out of shape by trying to force the kids to be able to read it from scratch by starting the first class with the reading. Instead, I never even showed the reading to the kids until we had done the auditory class first. I just told a superstar to stand up and be the guy showing the room to another kid who played the role of the the hotel guest. I really had the reading deeply imprinted in my mind while guiding the kids through the story – that was very important.
Acting out the story on the first day was fun because the reading, always in the back of my mind as a guide, never got in the way of us just having fun trying to create the scene together in the classroom. It turned out that the room the kids created was very small, the two windows huge, one was open and the other closed, the bathroom miniscule, and the woman very romantic when given the key by the guy who worked in the hotel, who wanted no part of that.
The kids were under the impression that they created this story. I did no PQA frontloading of structures, I did not follow three locations, there was no story script per se, just that little reading I found in the stuff I was cleaning out, and it worked. We spent the entire class making our little story up.
Imagine, the next day, when their story was up on the big screen! Every single kid read it easily. We spun out a little into grammar, discussed some details in French a little more, and then had an easy yes/no quiz that they all passed easily, most with perfect scores (Was the room small, class? Did the woman give the guy the key?, easy ones like that and in yes/no form….). None of those second day successes would have been possible had we reversed the order of our work by trying to read first and then spin out a story from that the next day – the story set up the reading and that is what mastery of TPRS/CI entails. That order mimicks how human beings learn their first language.
Oh, and I noticed that lately I have had almost perfect attendance, for about a week now, in a class that ends at 3:30 p.m. in a school with a culture of non-attendance with parents who very often work two or three jobs and in some cases don’t know what state or country their parents are in and so often have brothers and sisters to watch at home.
Why are they coming to class? Because they know that by simply coming to class, they are guaranteed at least a B and probably an A and, if they don’t show up in class, they will certainly fail. The kids are being motivated to come to class by the fact that they know they will succeeed. It took them about eight weeks to figure this easy daily quiz thing out, but they have it now – they get that I am not against them.
I charge all book teachers that if you beat a kid over the head with verb conjugations and a book, they will learn to dislike you and the language you teach. But if you offer them a way to succeed, they will one day become your AP students and that class will be American looking, not all white females, and you will thereby guarantee yourself a job for years to come, a job that you like to do with great kids. (They always send the wrong kids to the book teachers, right? And they always send us the right ones, right? How cool.)
Anyway, consider doing the Card Stories. Consider the Reading Stories as well, which, as described above, are nothing more than little stories based on little readings that you may have lying around. Consider relaxing. Make up a little story and read it the next day. Choose anything as source materials. Be the forest. In this way, you will gain mastery over time of comprehensible input. Stop worrying about everything. Become a master. What is a master? Someone who knows how to relax.