I sense that there are phases to this work. I don’t think it inaccurate to say that August and September are really about what John is doing. We norm our rooms or we suck air in these first six weeks. That is a fact. We personalize as well. We start with stories only if we have already done that with our kids the year before.
And. of course, to complicate the discussion, there is the issue of levels. Level 1 must have the CWB fun to start. That personalization is huge and everybody pretty much agrees on that. Then stories happen usually sometime about now in late September or in October, generally.
Level 2 kids, who have done CWB, are generally good to go with stories and lots of reading – I just spent an entire year preparing a big group of level 1’s for that extra reading – and my new Weekly Schedule (2012) reflects those changes to more reading on Fridays but is pretty much the same as last year.
Higher levels for CI trained kids are a very new frontier area, and that frontier is now being explored by those of us who have trained our own kids in CI from the beginning and can see the marvelous and challenging peaks and valleys that come with that situation, in truly uncharted territory. We hope to see as many reports from that frontier as we can this year.
Higher levels for non-CI trained kids suck. I just can’t believe how Fricking Little (cousin of Chicken Little) the kids have learned in three or four years of traditional training. I’m serious, they don’t know shit. That work would have to be all about stories because they haven’t heard much of the spoken TL in all those years.
It amazes me to teach such kids. Even if I did every Matava story she has, it would not outdo the damage caused by the amount of worksheets those kids have had to suffer through in their first two or three years of study of the language. All stories all the time for them.
So this ramble has a point. I want to know what October looks like at the different levels and be able to knock around some ideas so that we can have a kind of yearly plan (not A BULLSHIT PACING GUIDE) that actually means something TO US as TPRS/CI instructors.
October, I am certain in my own mind, MUST include, in addition to what we are already doing, a surge of work in getting to know the kids better. Not in the PQA in a Wink! way, but in the way of learning their learning styles and getting everyone a job.
Those topics will be addressed in the next article as this topic of yearly planning for October unfolds. I must now remember to get the LSI thing published here for our use in October. An introduction to that is given in the next articles in this series, and I hope it makes sense because it’s the middle of the night and I don’t know what I’m doing.