Reading in under an hour-Betsy Paskvan

I have to admit that I was so involved in learning Japanese, that I didn't take many notes in this session.  So I'll break down the process and then I'll put in my notes...

1. Select a culminating reading (this goes back to the idea of being intentional with what we are teaching)
2. Pull out structures that your students don't know, that are high frequency, and that are NOT cognates
3. Establish meaning of those structures and gesture (if you feel like it)
4. PQA
5. Break your story into pieces with visual support (I LOVED this idea, but I'm not sure how much time it will take...)
6. Read as a group (this is actually read and discuss: asking questions like who, what, how, where, etc)

Everything was pretty understandable, but I loved how Betsy had her story broken up on the PowerPoint.  Our story was about Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy from the Great Gatsby and the story was basically that Tom and Gatsby liked Daisy, who was beautiful, but she didn't like them.  So the first slide was a picture of Gatsby (Leo from the movie) with the text "There was Leo" next to a picture of Daisy with "There was Daisy" next to a picture of Tom "There was Tom"  The next slide was another picture of Daisy with the text "Daisy is beautiful" next to a picture of Mia Farrow as Daisy with text "Mia is also beautiful"  You get the idea.  For me, a super novice with Japanese, it was immensely helpful.  I'm sure it will be for my students as well.

Okay, here's where the awesome thing happened.  After we read through the picture, we read the boring old text with no pictures.  She had us get with a partner.  One partner looked at the text and tried to help the other partner (with back to text) re-tell the story.  Here's the genius part:  the practice was not for the person trying to re-tell the story because they are just struggling like crazy.  The person who is actually getting the help and the repetitions is the partner helping the re-teller because they are reading the story AGAIN without realizing it!  Amazing, right?  Then, here's what little-miss-smarty-pants Betsy did next.  She asked for a volunteer partnership to model for the class.  And then the WHOLE class was reading the story AGAIN without realizing it!!!  That Betsy, she's sneaky :)

Like I said, I didn't take a ton of notes because the Japanese was just too fascinating.  Great session!