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Report from the Field – Rachel Martinez
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11 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Rachel Martinez”
Congratulations! It sounds like you had a fabulous ending to your day. And I believe we all need to take a day, every now and then, and cease the circling etc and just ‘see’ what the kids can ‘do’ (AKA assess). One, we are usually surprised and in awe and two, it makes our bosses happy (especially if our day just ‘happens to coincide’ with one of their visits). Well done! Be proud!
This is beautiful!!
with love,
Laurie
“It was a total accident ”
Don’t you love how “accidents” are such delightful surprises! What a great story! You could not have planned this, and that is what makes it so exciting. Your kids just took over so naturally, and you stepped into the student role and it all just flowed! LOVE THIS!!! Definitely inspiring and shows the great respect and safety you have created among your students!
Is this Rachel from the queens beer garden sunny afternoon tprs gathering?
What an excellent idea. When we have to think fast we sometimes come up with the best stuff. I love how you tried something different and went with the flow. I bet sitting amongst the kids helped you bond with them.
Thank you so much yall! Your encouragement means a great deal to me! And Yes Catherina, it is me from the Queens meet up in May!
This “sitting with the kids” sounds like a power house idea. It needs to be codified, probably with the caveat that it will work best with those special groups in which there is extreme trust and a few super-all-stars. Rachel, have you done this with ALL your classes, or just the one you mention in your story?
Yes, inspired by her story I sat down and enjoyed my Chinese 2 class for a while in this way. They had read a short scene with a group and made Incredible Shrinking Summaries. A volunteer reader read their summaries as the rest of the group acted them out silently. It was fun. This way, the ‘performers’ could see that I was smiling and enjoying their silly acting. I’m going to do it again.
Diane…please explain this Incredible Shrinking Summaries idea….it sounds like a gem!!
Hi Angie, I got this idea elsewhere. Would’ve thought in here or on Martina Bex’s website… but neither seem to have it when I searched. Does anyone know a source? (Last year I’d started collecting ideas without recording from whom and where… now I keep track.)
The idea is:
Students read a text. I wrote up a story in 3 scenes, each about 15 sentences — a group of 3 or 4 worked together to read & understand each one. (Small class, 11 kids.)
They summarize it into 10 sentences. (Mainly pulling and condensing from the original, of course.)
They summarize that into 5 sentences.
That gets summarized again into 2 sentences, and then into 1 sentence.
I had to cut this back to 5, 2, and 1 sentence versions with my class. Then they shared by reading and acting along with the 1-, then 2-, then 5-sentence version. Essentially, they created embedded readings for the rest of the class. I typed (and edited as needed, which wasn’t very much) their summaries and will have students read the other 2 scenes tomorrow and do a quick translation to English of the 5-sentence other scenes. They had to read closely and understand well to condense it, and I think seeing the acted versions and then reading them tomorrow will be a good follow-up. I let them pick the names of the characters in each scene, which was fun – they put their own names into it. Higher interest than if I’d done it.
Oh yeah – I did this also with Chinese 3 today. We read & briefly discussed the text first, then I read it once straight through with feeling, so they didn’t have the hard work of reading on their own. (I made Chinese 2 do that because they gave me a pain the day before! I didn’t want to have to goad them.) The 3’s they worked on shrinking summaries independently (they’re more capable of that than Chinese 2). They’ll share tomorrow.
Thanks, Diane. This idea is very interesting. The are becoming more familiar with the text each time and creating advanced thoughts/sentences. We are reading a novel right now and I try to do something different with each chapter. I could choose a page and try this activity. This way it keeps entertaining their brain without becoming tedious