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Water Wings
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22 thoughts on “Water Wings”
I think SSR/FVR should be on the list of Bail Out Moves. The trick is in how we present it. If I think of it as punishment, the students will perceive it as punishment. If I think of it as just another activity we’re doing that day, the students will perceive it that way as well. Sometimes we just need to say, “Well that didn’t work out very well now, did it? Let’s try something else.”
BTW, we are currently reading “Arme Anna”, and I spent our period today getting them ready for Chapter 4. Using an idea from Bryce (He has a great Teacher’s Guide) I had my TA put up posters around the Quad labeling the different places the girls go. Then I took my students outside, and we walked to the different places and talked about what Anna does in each place. I think doing that should reinforce the reading tomorrow.
One of my top bail out moves is to stop creating more story and tell my class to finish it for me. I tell them “You guys are so creative, you’d do a much better job than I would finishing this out.” I put them in small groups, give each group a small (1/8 sheet) pieces of paper and have them bang out their own endings to the story. I’ll usually put an online timer on the LCD projector (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/) with a time limit to keep the writing from becoming a bull session, and then I move on.
Then when it comes time for me to write up the story for the next day, I just write up the various alternate endings as well and we can compare and contrast those as we go.
I have grabbed a children’s book and read to them. I do it along the lines of kindergarten day, but for only for a few moments. I tend to do it with about 10 minutes left to class. They don’t get as many repetitions as they do when I read to them on kindergarten day, but it definitely has helped me when I had already “plannned” to read to them that week/day.
Right on Robert, Nathan and Clarice. I have added those moves to the list on the post entitled Bail Out Moves since comments tend to roll into the past pretty fast. Then I will create a category for Bail Out Moves and we can then always find the list simply by clicking on it in the category list.
On bailing out with a parallel story–I’m doing PQA the other night. I ask who called whom, and the first person says the mom called the son to dinner and the second person says she called her brother to dinner. What were the boys doing? Homework. Do they like their homework? Yeah, they’re good students. Snooze city. I wouldn’t even want to start writing that with the whole class.
I look over and see a creative student smirking, and ask whom she called for what, and the creative one says that she was calling her cat to dinner, but her husband got mad at her for calling the cat to dinner because the cat has bad manners. He insists on washing at the table, and the wife has to go into another room and call the cat, luring him away with a raw fish (which the cat brings back to share with the family).
It’s the same thing with a story–if it’s boring, you can suddenly invent a new character in a different place with a similar problem or experience, but with a whole new set of circumstances. That’s when you can use the trick of starting in the middle, changing your voice and saying dramatically, “But class! There was a lion tamer whose lion called him to dinner. . .” What saved me the other night was that I honestly kept forgetting which good boy was called by whom and which subject he liked. That kept the reps flowing until I could get another story going and could see the twinkle starting in a set of eyes.
This is absolutely nothing new, but instead of getting all worried that it’s going nowhere, I just have to trust that somewhere in the class is a person with an interesting story using the same structure I am hanging onto, if I still think that it’s important (we were going to read the beginning of Houdini, so I needed “called”).
Or…I could have done Jody’s interrogation technique, now that I think about it. I could have said, “Maria, you say that you called your brother, and he came right away. Class, did Maria really call her brother?? Did he come right away? Was he really doing homework?” You could pause on any of that information and plug in whatever the class is likely to give you (keeping protection of students in mind so they still come out as stars).
Had to share this ….today we were doing a little PQA with “wakes up” and we found out that one of my student’s gets woken up each morning by her mom…who stands at the bottom of the stairs with a BLOWHORN lololol True story….and better than anything I could have made up lolololol
with love,
Laurie
I am going to add a “postscript” to this though…..Ben, ya know I love ya, but “advertising”, alternate lesson plan as “bail-out plans” is just asking for trouble. :o) I smile, but I’m serious. We need to represent our teaching in the most professional way possible so I propose a new title for the list…CI Detour perhaps???? I know that we sometimes eschew the formal such as “Alternative Lesson Plan” or ” Differentiated Alternative”…but in order to communicate with folks from another culture, (dramatic pause), we need to learn to speak their “language”. Then have our own “tags”….but stay away from anything that implies taking an “easy route”.
with love,
Laurie
Just a thought my dear. Sometimes we get so used to pounding holes through walls that we miss seeing an open door….
with love,
Laurie
This thread made me think of a yahoo post that I saved on my tprs page of 15 ways to repeat a story with a difficult group. One of our local French teachers said that it saved her once last year.
http://russianrocks.wikispaces.com/TPRS#Fifteen%20repetitions
Right under that post is a pdf of weekly routine ideas, which I kept on my desk for the longest time with the same general idea of adapting my lesson plan when I would otherwise get deeper and deeper into a rut. I’ll have to print that out again. I’m sure that the routine has changed since then (many of us have chucked the weekly plan, but others might feel more secure with a structure), but I remember that there were great ideas.
Michelle, Thanks as well for posting Karen Rowan’s ideas for SUB PLANS. Ben, this would be a very useful category in itself on the blog, especially since flu season is on its way. I see much overlap between sub plans and Laurie’s nice euphemism “CI detour” strategies.
Wait, Laurie …. you mean there’s a door…?
Ben
Today my creative juices are not with me, but my 5th grade desperately needs more repetitions. I created a word-problem. Really simple math, but with lots of necessary reps. It did the job and the kids had fun with the new change. The word problem was very easy to create (I probably should have done a couple more of them). I will surely use this ‘alternative lesson plan’ again.
Michele, that was a great post by that Russian teacher! I hope that goes into the category possibly formerly known as “bail-out moves.”
Liz, can you give an example of the word problem you talk about?
Not sure Ben…I’d have to pull my head out from the hole in the wall to find out :o) but yeah…all teachers ought to have a Plan B…although I really like Jim’s title of Category Possibly Formerly Known as “Bail Out Moves” Maybe we should just go with the acronyms….you know how we TPRSers like those…what do you think…. BOMs ? :o)
I live way too close to Columbine High for that one. Hmmm. How about Water Wings, as per one of my responses to Clarice’s term drowning?
Michele you said two things here that are way too important not to repeat…like every day. The first one:
…it’s the same thing with a story – if it’s boring, you can suddenly invent a new character in a different place with a similar problem or experience, but with a whole new set of circumstances…
This is exactly what Blaine one time when told me when I asked him what the secret was and he told me you just do this downward spiral of questions/parking on the target structures, each time going down one level of the spiral and with each new detail the spiral gets so loaded up with details that it is like a spring wound up too tight. At that point, saturated with details and nowhere to go, we either bring in a new character or a new event, which catapults the story forward. I hope I said that right. The idea is that you keep adding details until you can’t anymore, then you bring in the new character or event.
You also said this which is one of those things we can’t forget so I’ll just repeat it here:
Or…I could have done Jody’s interrogation technique, now that I think about it. I could have said, “Maria, you say that you called your brother, and he came right away. Class, did Maria really call her brother?? Did he come right away? Was he really doing homework?” You could pause on any of that information and plug in whatever the class is likely to give you (keeping protection of students in mind so they still come out as stars).
If we want to give these ideas names so that we can remember them more easily we might call Blaine’s the spiraling technique and Jody’s the interrogation technique.
On the subject of “saturation, add new character, or new event”: I guess I have always done this without too much intentional thought–my desperation sparking my imagination sometimes.
Can I tell you the power of “the pregnant pause” as all action and conversation stop and I walk ceremoniously to the counter where I keep each class box containing the tickets with each class member’s name written on them? I always ask the class, even though I know, “Which box is it? Is it the blue one? the transparent one?, etc. (I’m just yanking them out to create more anticipation)
OMG! Fingers cross, eyes close in prayer (I kid you not), breath is held–all in anticipation that their ticket be pulled and they be chosen to be the next “new” character. The chosen one always says (It’s now a ritual.), “I knew it! I knew it!” If I choose the name of an absent student, everyone chants in chorus, “Must be present to win!” And their fingers re-cross. My kids are a whole lot of fun.
Just this pause and “change of state” from the “dead end” in the story causes a huge shift in focus. Now, they can’t wait to see what happens next. Blaine sure knows a lot of stuff. I like being reminded of it so that I confidently and intentionally practice it as part of “tprs practice”–not as a bail out.
Thank you so much for reminders. I need them.
You are right Jody it’s not a bail out at all. How old are the kids?
11-12-13
Jody needs to present. Period.
We can get you some water wings if you need them.
with love,
Laurie
She didn’t formally present in LA – she is already a great coach – but she has so much to offer in particular about elementary. Jody not to put any pressure on but I agree with Laurie.
Plus while we are talking about planning this summer I would like to invite all road bikers to Denver this summer for some CI discussion and riding the Rockies. When you are going five miles an hour for seven hours up a 14,000 foot mountain – round trip from my house is 114 miles – you want some good company and some cool stuff to talk about and what is cooler than CI and who is better company than teachers who are all interested in getting better at the same thing?
So Ben Lev is coming here from SF with his bike in July. Think about it anyway, Mark Webster and y’all road warriors. We can also ride the Denver bike paths and maybe go up around Bryce’s turf in Loveland. If we go up Mt. Evans Bryce and Reuben Vyn from George Washington will be up and down before Ben and I are up but what the hey. They might get enough speed coming down to coast all the way to St. Louis.
Anyway, all who ride road bikes are invited – we are planing those three or four days of riding right before the national conference in July.
And Jody how about it? Laurie can be the kid who won the ticket and gets to sit on the chair.
Sorry for the late response, Tripp. I teach elementary kids and I was using carries/takes (lleva), sells (vende) and makes (hace)…the word problem went something like this:
Johnny makes tamales. Johnny makes delicious tamales. Johnny makes tamales to sell. Johnny wants a bike. The bike that Johnny wants costs $253.00. A dozen tamales cost $12.00. Johnny already sold 20 dozen tamales. How many more tamales does Johnny need to sell?
Johnny’s mom takes the tamales to school. She takes six dozen tamales to school, but only sells three dozen. Then she goes to the Shakira concert. How many tamales does she take to the concert?
The first one was a little too tough for most of my 5th graders, so I will use something like the second one tomorrow. It was still fun for them, though…and we got some more input, which was the goal, of course.
Jody…I love your ideas about the pregnant pause, and agree that you should present!