So tomorrow I have five teaching colleagues and my new principal and Diana and a district coach in my classroom for a few classes. If they all show up. That’s why I was searching around this week for a script that can be used this early with level 1 kids.
As always, Anne Matava came through for me. She sent that simple story – published here today – that I am calling Thorndike. I needed to hear the message this week that has been in a few threads – we reach kids with comprehensible input when we go slowly, when we teach to the eyes, when we use all the skills we know, and, here is the big thing that I got this week in preparing my classes for these visitors tomorrow – when the language we present to them is language that they already know, except for the new target structures for that story script.
For that to happen I needed for my guests a much simpler story script than the one I had been considering (Cheap Jewelry from Anne’s Vol. 2 Story Scripts). Now I get it, for the hundredth time (that’s what this stuff is – a continual returning to and rediscovery of simple things that we in our wisdom always succeed in making too complex).
I also really got what Anne was saying when she suggested that I just chop down Cheap Jewelry into a simpler version that the kids could easily understand just by removing some of the vocabulary and sentences and offering the kids an intact but pared down story.
Anyway, since we always want to be confident with stories, especially when being observed, I am just writing this out to remind myself that in any class, with visitors or not, it’s all about SLOW, of course, but it is also really about choosing a simple text, one that the kids can get. This means a text that absolutely does not contain any new stuff that they don’t know besides the target structures as per this blog post from this week:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/05/only-the-structures-can-be-new/