Now, to push the rebar/concrete image further, but hopefully not too far, please note something else. If we add too many new rocks/words to the concrete/story on Tuesday, it then overloads the rebar and the concrete fails – the story doesn’t work – even if we got over 120 structures on each structure on Monday.
We have to do both – make the rebar strong via massive repetition of the target structures, but also use, in an ideal world, only words that the students already know so that the structures hammered all day on Monday are the only new sounds that they have to deal with in the story. By doing that we avoid the chances that the concrete (the story) will fail.
So I am saying two things here in blog posts 1 and 2 about rebar:
– we need to vastly increase the repetitions of the three target structures before starting the story
– we need to vastly limit the addition of new words to the story itself.
