Twisted Novels

6 thoughts on “Twisted Novels”

1. Ben Lev

   May 15, 2012 at 5:06 pm

   This is brilliant! When I taught second and third grade the kids *loved* “fractured” fairy tales — an intriguing twist on the familiar.

   So I did this today–plugged in the laptop to the LCD, and together on the big screen we wrote a twisted version of the weeks-long Mexican teen soap opera we’ve been watching. As usual, it had different types of vampires in it. They loved it, followed with a quiz, most did fine. Tonight I’ll embellish it and we’ll read tomorrow.

   Thanks Ben for the idea–made my classes go fast today!

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   1. Ben Slavic

      May 15, 2012 at 7:29 pm

      Yeah and maybe creating a reading with them can be done in short bursts. Over all, this would drag, as I said somewhere else here today. Congrats on that Ben, sounds like it was a lot of fun. (I won’t tell anybody that I know a teacher who had fun teaching in May – they wouldn’t get it.)

      I had a profound thought during the day but it won’t sound profound here – the more we can get goofy with our own affective filters, which means trusting the kids more, the more we can enter their world and take cues from them and produce whacky twisted material, personalized to the group.

      And notice what lies in the next field to this thought – when we do this, and there is dialogue, we are a hop over a fence away from Reader’s Theatre! That’s all Jason does -he take something fairly normal and makes it silly via hyperbole and personalization and visual gags.

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2. lori f

   May 15, 2012 at 5:40 pm

   “…we don’t try to create it with the class, which any of us who have tried that knows doesn’t work. Creating a parallel novel in class is literally impossible because of time factors and the managing during class of managing too many conflicting ideas.”

   I could do this–I’ve tried and failed horribly to create a parallel novel in class for the reasons you mention; time factors and too many conflicting ideas. I finally just gave up. And sadly, another remark of yours also rings all too true:

   “if we don’t give the kids really stupid stuff to read that is twisted and slightly off center, they won’t read it. I don’t know what that says about the kids in our society.”

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3. Ben Slavic

   May 15, 2012 at 6:43 pm

   We can create auditory content with the kids, but all readings we create ourselves, is the message I am learning here.

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4. John Piazza

   May 16, 2012 at 12:17 am

   Haven’t we come to the conclusion that all input during years 1 and 2 should be auditory input? Is there, or should there even be, room for extended readings during this time, unless they are basically transcriptions of class stories, and have 90% or more known vocabulary?

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5. Ben Slavic

   May 16, 2012 at 8:48 am

   Yes and Krashen told me that in my classroom three months ago. I asked him point blank in our debriefing how he would spend the entire first year (I was hoping that he would say what I wanted him to say bc there were a lot of pro-CI teachers sitting there who don’t agree with me and I wanted to hear it from, as it were, the big dog’s mouth) and right on cue he says, it should be 100% ALL auditory input the first year.

   I then clarified, asking about how much reading should be in that 100% auditory, boss man? He shrugged it off, and what I got from that was that we can read maybe a little in the first year, but a lot less than the CI community now thinks fashionable.

   It’s so weird, but honestly I think we have misinterpreted Krashen on the reading piece. He has written so much on it with such impeccable credentials, research and authority that we have glommed on to it without really thinking enough about how his research affects what we do in our community.

   I know that the person who knows Krashen best by far in our small group is Jody, and she said (correct me on this if I am wrong, Jody) that she is not real big on reading the novels in the first year. That really resonated with me. It is like the kids are forced to read before they are ready.

   As I said elsewhere here today, 125 hours of CI is not much. And we now want to put half of those hours in the form of reading, even at level one? That just feels wrong. Would I do that with a small child during the first 125 hours? I would not.

   The neurology is just not there. That is why SK said that. I suggest that we read maybe 10% of the time in level one, and then bring in the 50% idea in level two. That would mean dumping the novels in level one, which don’t work for the kids.

   We think the novels don’t work for the kids bc they are boring, but it is because they can’t really understand them. This is getting worse as TV and computers are now ripping away at American kids’ ability to read in their first language.

   So I say we consider these things for next year. Thanks John for saying that. And to give my opinion on your second point:

   …is there, or should there even be, room for extended readings during this time, unless they are basically transcriptions of class stories, and have 90% or more known vocabulary…?

   My answer, and I will do this next year even if I am the only one, is to only do Pauvre Anne or Houdini late in the spring, with no extended readings – and again, to be forcibly clear – because they are boring to the kids in that they are too difficult to read and there is no life in them anyway, not the kind of life we get from stories and PQA.

   The only reading I will do with beginning classes next year, therefore, are the readings from stories as per my new weekly schedule of PQA Monday, stories T/W, and readings on T/Fr. Many level one teachers here in DPS do the entire series (of four) of Blaine’s novels all in level one. It doesn’t feel right to me.

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