Below is an option to the “Suggested Block Schedule A” posted here a few days ago. It is another way to experience 90 effortless minutes with the kids while staying in the target language. So how does it work?
It’s just one big ass One Word Image (see benslavic.com/resources/workshop handouts for how to do a one word image). It is always frustrating to be in the middle of one of these images and have the bell ring to signal the end of class.
So, with the block, we really go deep with the image. We just keep building it. A kid – the “artist” of the class – draws it all on the back of the rolling whiteboard to be unveiled later in class as indicated below.
In one recent class we took about an hour to build in our minds – while the image was actually being drawn out of sight on the back of the whiteboard – a huge house in South Africa (we had just welcomed a new student from South Africa that day) on the beach with three huge arms, (“like a lobster” was the chant) coming out of the right side of the hours, along with various other details.
After the requisite brain break about forty minutes in, the image got saturated with 30 minutes left in class. We added a small pink sombrero on top of the house (the artist rocked it!) after the brain break but we didn’t get too many details after that.
It doesn’t matter – it was CI with energy and that is all that counts. So when it ran out of energy we just wheeled the board around and discussed what we saw – a kind of visual retell of everything we had said. The artist was there to receive praise and add new touches that might be added during that visual phase of the CI.
Then, with about 20 minutes left in class, we played a rousing version of the Word Chunk Team game based on the image we just saw created by the artist. In the game, the instructor need only look at the image and make up sentences or chunks that the kids then translate.
I am not yet clear if this game can work with classes over 25. The kids have too much fun and it gets a little rowdy. It is up to the individual teacher to make that decision. If it works, it gives a nice needed change after the 60 minutes of straight CI with only one brain break. (Only one brain break is needed in this kind of class because the one word chunking game is a half hour long brain break in itself.)
So to repeat the process:
1. We take a noun (we always pick ours from the word lists on the wall) and build it as far as it can be circled until the image is saturated. If the word stalls, we just add in a new event or character as Blaine has taught us to do in stories.
2. During that first huge section of CI we take a brain break.
3. After the CI is finally done, we unveil the picture that the artist has drawn out of sight of the class during the CI and we formally discuss it as a kind of visual retell of the CI.
4. After that (generally about an hour into the block as in the above example), we play the Word Chunk Team activity based on all the CI we did that class period for the rest of the block. The kids are always surprised when the bell announces the end of class.