I had mentioned earlier the Educreation website that Chris brought to us this week from Kristen. Here is a sample story in Latin from John:
John says about it:
…I made this in about 5 minutes, only because the drawings took me so long to make. That’s what a terrible artist I am….
Remember that we had said that it fits perfectly as a fourth mega-effective job for kids to add to the three most important jobs for kids (of 59 – see Jobs for Kids): the story writer, the quiz writer and the story artist.
(The educreationist could also be blended with the story artist’s job; we haven’t figured it all out yet.) Of course, it would be placed after the story but before we start the reading and if we try to get it all done (impossible), then our stories would be about five minutes long, so obviously this new job will extend everything in our new (2014-2015) sequence of instruction to at least two days, probably three. Of course, this addition will make for a fantastically strong block lesson of 80 minutes or more.
If you think about, in these little stories we have:
1. changing images
2. printed words
3. spoken words
4. emotions
When we learn from a textbook or a novel/chapter book, we have no or very few static images, therefore little or no emotion. So without the changing images, the emotions and also the spoken words that we see and hear in this sample educreation (there are more samples below), interest is low. With only the printed words in the book, the use of reading lowers itself perhaps in importance in our choice of best CI strategies. We may have to talk about that. My first thought is that we would start reading novels much later than we normally do because of this return to stories that seem to be the order of the day for some us for this coming year.
I want to repeat that – people flail with novels sometimes. Do we start too early? Do we frustrate them when we start even Pauvre Anne (Blaine) or Brandon Wants a Dog (Carol) too early? Many of our kids can’t read very well in their native language or in English. Should we then perhaps accept that stories are more interesting to beginning students in lower level classes and novels perhaps more effective in upper levels?
I have always felt that best practices in this work involve delaying reading so that there is no struggle for our students – if they do enough stories in the first two years, we know what will happen in level 3 (only 250 hours): they will pick up one of those books like Houdini and read it in like an hour if they were to read it in level three for the first time after all those stories.
Am I recommending that we do this? I recommend nothing, I just share ideas. And I talk a lot. We learn quickly when we fully embrace this work to make curricular decisions that reflect our own teaching personality. This is a Horn of Plenty that keeps on giving and if Teacher A likes apples and I like oranges they are both there – we both get to take what we want.
But I love the idea of delaying reading of the novels. We have already decided that reading novels is an upper level thing anyway because it is so hard to just keep doing stories in level 3 and above – the kids get burnt out on them and the coming AP type of testing demands require us to go to the big horses of authentic readings and all that.
Yes, we want to read 50% or more of the time, but those novels/ chapter books, since they are just not that interesting, will cause the students to not lock on to them in the way they will when we do the Three Steps, as they go from PQA into a story and then into processing the work of four students. (In my mind the processing of the work of the Four Students is kind of the second part of Step 2 of TPRS after the story and then into a Step 3 reading.)
When you watch John’s story, and (1) see it move, and (2) read it, and (3) listen to it, and (4) hear the emotion in John’s voice (without probably noticing it), we at that point are approximating for our students something akin to normal speech only with mega repetitions occurring in the rest of our lesson before and after our little educreation films. This moves the language acquisition equation in our classroom from one or two dimensions to four. The image supports the speech, the emotion in the voice supports the focus on meaning, the speech supports the reading, and the fact that it was drawn by a student about something the students created, all play to our curricular objectives of more and more student involvement in our comprehension based classes. What happens is that they think they have full artistic control of everything going on but all they are doing is answering our questions. We are in full control. When they are thus engaged, as well, discipline problems evaporate. We just have to make sure we circle enough in the PQA part of the process, as always, so that they can understand the educreation without effort after the PQA and the story have been completed.
We were like kids with new toys at Christmas with our iPads this past week. (What do we call these things? They aren’t little films but they kind of are.) Chris came in and made an educreation in my Thursday morning presentation of an image I was creating with my class and I didn’t even notice him back there until he came up after the story and showed it on his iPad and blew everybody’s minds.
Thank you John for sending this in. I know that we will see more and more of this stuff. Chris Stoltz is researching other such programs. He told me last night that there is so much new stuff like this exploding all over the internet that we need to be cautious and keep all the new technology from flooding our circuits. I know tech is all the rage now, but it only has one of many places in our WL classrooms. Unless Chris finds something even more simple to use, I say we stay with educreations.
Here is the Educreations website:
http://www.educreations.com/
Here is another one Joe Eye sent me this morning:
Here are the educreations links for the lessons Carly and AnneMarie did in the middle of the week:
Carly- http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/le-gran-poisson-carly-robinson/22951192/?s=dDolj4&ref=link (NOTE: this text was written by a non-French speaker, so there are grammar errors. Big deal.)
AnneMarie – http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/habla-de-asiago/22951258/?s=0D91CM&ref=link