Alisa continues her very excellent critique of Sarah’s work:
- More Teaching to the Eyes; more Point & Pause & SLOW – these are basic skills and must be consciously practiced. Sarah doesn’t regularly make eye contact or Pause & Point…yet, and we all could stand to slow our TL rate of speech waaaaay down!
- Reps/recycling from beginning of story: Need more of it – clarifying of facts by asking Yes/no & either/or Qs; constantly going back to story in novel ways – questions, statements, intentionally wrong details…and we need to hear the kids answering your questions.
- The Artist – I am just curious – is she drawing because she’s pretty solid on the language/content at hand? I don’t let anyone (at this age/level) draw if they still need to attend to new words coming in…I find it distracts them from the listening-for-comprehension behaviors. Later when the new language is more solid and goes into full story mode – that’s when I hire an artist – (who sits away from the others). Better yet, we all draw once the story is solid, we’ve acted it out, etc.
- Compelling: Maybe the teacher comparing self and kids to others who run fast/not fast would inject some humor, excitement and associations into this cycle. Roadrunner, Mr. Incredible’s son, Dash =Fast and i.e., Eyore (Pooh bear’s donkey friend) or an image of a turtle =slow. Fast and slow are great adjectives to use in this story, so as they come up, attaching them to a stock character that demonstrates these qualities can help ease the load and clarify the meanings.
Then compare students to the characters and to self for the 1st person.
When the shark (kreesh) is introduced, you could have a class sound effect every time the word is spoken – like the Jaws music (Joseph plays with it momentarily) with the shark fin hand gesture. I do this a lot for animals & other words in my classroom – i.e. everyone makes a slap clap galloping sound for the word, “horse” ending w/a group whinny – even though they already know the word. It’s become a silly class ‘thing.’
This is fun but more importantly also slows down the incoming language for everyone, gives the brain a break and of course helps with matching word to meaning. These expectations that everyone does the gesture help keep the Ss ‘with you.’ Dramatization is another great way to keep kids engaged. I picture the shark running after Barry – the kids dramatizing it in your house!
- Comprehension Checks: Need WAY MORE throughout the lesson – I can’t see evidence that the Ss understand – and I don’t know what was presented in previous classes…especially on the verbs. When Sarah asks a Q and the students don’t answer, we need to find out exactly what part of the Q they’re not getting – so we ask them to translate the Q. T: Mah Hem Oseem? S: What do they do/are they doing.