Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Absences make the heart grow fonder

I've been sick. Yuck. Missed three days of school. It was really nice to get back into the classroom and back into the swing of things. My kids were (mostly) excited to see me back. I had kids asking "Are we telling a story today???? Can I be in it?????" Seriously? However, all their enthusiasm didn't make my classroom any quieter today. I keep experimenting, and maybe that is the problem. I need to figure out what I'm going to make work and stick with it. Byron recently posted something on FLTeach about the way he makes his class work and I think I'm going to take a little of that...a little of the rules on the wall...and a few days and get this back in shape. Next week is our first full week in a long while, so I'll get something together and I'll see how it goes!

Today I tried something that I thought would work really well. For my beginners, it was a little tough, but I bet it would be a riot for some more advanced classes or classes who've had more than a couple months of novice TPRS instruction. Last week, we really worked a story. Re-tells, picture drawing, reading, etc. I have two classes of that level, so I thought it would be fun to take their drawings (I had groups draw one scene from the story) and have the other class write stories about the drawings. The set-up was similar and the key phrases were there, so they had some idea of what was going on. I started with individual re-writes and then had them work in groups of 2 or 3 to combine to make the best possible story. We shared with the class and then I had them vote on which story they thought was the best. The winners got a free homework pass for my class (kind of silly since there really isn't a whole lot of HW in my class, but they were excited!)

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