If you look at this link:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/bail-out-moves/
you can find some options – what I call “bail out moves” – to switch to right in the middle of class in those times when “it ain’t working”. The one I suggest here is a kind of instant “writing” activity.
I would only go to this with a level 2 class or above (level 1 kids should not write at all, in my view). Here’s how it works for me:
I take the last thing I said, or whatever I have cobbled together so far in the floundering story, and have the kids write the last few sentences I said. Fairly simple. Again, it’s to get me out of the sweaty collar thing where fear creeps in bc they are blurting and I am not feelin’ it.
I just ask the kids to take out their Writing Log. This is a piece of paper where they write anything I want them to write any time, which is kept in their notebooks and which I collect for a writing grade if and when the gradebook calls my name, usually on a Friday every week or two or three.
It’s not a dictée – I say what I want them to write in English. Then, as in dictée, I write the correct sentence on the board.
What this somewhat odd exercise does is send the kid back into all the SOUND that they heard up to the point of the Intant Writing ACtivity. That is bc I think that we write from sound. We hear the correct language banging away in our heads and only upon hearing that sound can we genuinely write.
I may be wrong on this – I am going on intuition, in fact,without consulting the research, although I would wonder which is more authoritative, the research of someone who has never been in a high school classroom or one who has been in one for 37 years.
So far most of us only use free writes and dictée to teach our kids writing.
Why might this idea, if it works, prove valuable as a tool to teach writing? It is bc of the high interest we get in some stories that we don’t get in novels.
The idea being that if the kids are more into what they are writing, this could help get some good writing practice in for them besides just being a bail out move for us.
This writing activity, connected to the story we are doing, could manifest in two ways:
1. I stop the class during the story and then do a writing burst of one or two sentences and then return to the story or go to some other bail out move. The sentence or sentences would be chosen from the last few sentences the kids heard. (A caution on this would be that you may lose the English only thing, but if you’re bailing anyway, you probably don’t have the no blurting thing going on anyway.)
2. Take a whole class and, instead of going directly from Step 2 to Step 3, where you are the one who writes the story from the notes given you by the Story Writer, you could take a class in between steps 2 and 3 and, together with the class, write out the story in the TL as a kind of writing lab, working, again, from the English and not from the TL as we do in dictée.