Q. How do I stay in bounds when new words keep emerging all the time?
A. The students need to understand the message, not the individual words. We are teaching language, not individual words. I have come to see after all these years that it is not what words we say, but how we say them. I should have been more like a good mother than a good teacher. With CI, it’s not about how the kids think during a story, but how they feel. Going out of bounds but having the kids in a state of feeling good and understanding the overall story line is far superior to staying in bounds and teaching some boring story line that is built around just teaching the words. That idea points the discussion right to the Invisibles, because the kids are so obviously engaged and happy during stories with invisible characters.