Here is something else worth sharing from when I talked to Tina last weekend:
I have recently found out that my students will trust me, that they can learn to trust me to bring the fun in a calm and consistent way, if I just ask them simple questions and not get all like a teacher conducting a class in the old way, going for repetitions, looking for mastery over a certain piece of the language. If I am just talking to them about their own creations, asking, for example, where the invisible character is, they are, for the most part, quite content to just sit there and listen. We spend a lot more time in the moments of creation of the story and a lot less time dithering over the details of the story. So nowadays I mainly just ask them where the character is and then later where they go to solve the problem. We are happy with just not knowing where it’s all going and oddly that is why the stories involving the Invisibles are so good….because once the character is known, either from a OWI or from a student’s drawing, then the kids are generally just curious to sit back and ride the rails of the plot that are already laid out with the levels of questioning. I even find that the problem is already there, waiting to emerge, because I only pick characters that have a problem built in to the image or the “back story” the kid imagined about them. Thus for the kids the experience is more like watching an episode of a cartoon. But the important thing is building that trust. That trust that you will keep it light, and keep the plotlines snappy, and just keep the stories coming.