Carly has an update from this last post, for those who have been using this activity:
Here’s the update:
Hey Ben! I did another gallery walk this week and it was great so I wanted to tell you about it. I’m full on in the middle of the story project right now, but we had a visit from our superintendent Friday and I was advised that I should not have them drawing all period. I hate having to change my plans for others but I also would hate to put my job in jeapordy, so…
I found 8 more student created characters that were decent but hadn’t made it into stories. I wrote up 8 paragraphs and put them around the room in 8 stations labeled A to H…so basically what I told you before except I only had one image per station instead of two. At each station I also put a prompt of what to do. I’ll put them all below, but they all started “read the paragraph with you group. Then …”
The kids came in and set up a blank piece of copy paper by folding it into 8 boxes and labelling them A to H. I assigned them starting stations, rang the bell that signaled “go” and sent them off to and read and think and write.
When it seemed like all the groups were mostly done at their first station, about 4 to 6 minutes I’d say, I rang the bell again and they rotated to the next station. This continued until the period was over.
I did not have to do anything but watch and ring a bell for the rest of the day. It was great.
Here are the tasks, I put one at each station:
Read the paragraph together…
A … Then translate or summarize in EnglishB… Then write a question about the characterC… Then make an inference about the characterD… Then compare the character to yourself(E through H were repeats of the above)
Just a note, we’ve been working on making inferences and expanding our writing by using ne … pas. So they are used to picking a sentence from a text like “Elle est bavarde” and writing “Elle n’est pas timide” for example. We’ve also been practicing accountable talk so they are pretty comfortable responding with “moi aussi, je…” and getting better at “moi, par contre…” It was cool to watch them practice those things in this activity.
Anyway, back to the book project Monday but this was a nice break.