Verifying and Dramatizing with Blaine Ray

Any time I get a chance to be in Blaine's class, I HAVE to take it.  This man is just so inspiring and loving...even if you can't be Blaine in your classroom, I always learn so much by watching him in action.

The purpose of this class was learning to use student actors in order to get more reps, engage students, give a visual representation of the story, and expose students to natural dialogue.  I did a much better job of this last year than I have ever done before, but I still think I can do a better job.

Blaine modeled how to use student actors and taught us German in the process.  We were working with this basic story, "There is a girl.  She wants a cow.  She has a bad cat."  So, he started by choosing his actor.  Blaine actually calls it an audition and lets the students know that they get one opportunity to audition or they will never get a chance to act again.  He modeled this by whispering in my ear what he would say to a stinky actor or a distract-er.  This is what he whispered, "Hey, this is your one shot to show me that you can be a superstar actor.  So I really need you to do your best acting job or you will never get the opportunity to act again."  I need to do a better job of choosing actors and coaching them to act better.

Okay, next step: Blaine says the sentence in the past "There was a girl."  Then, he turns to me, "Bess, are you a girl?"  I have to answer in a complete sentence, which is written on the board, so I really just have to read it at first.  When I say, "Yes, I am a girl," he says "Yes, that's right, you are a girl."  Then he turns to the class and says, "Class, Bess was a girl."  In this way, he is switching between past and present, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person...  We worked for over 15 minutes on just 5 sentences.  As a student, it didn't seem like we were going to slow and I didn't get bored.  I think we tend to try to go to fast in class and forget to sit on the facts for a while.

Then, we got in groups of three and practiced this.  I got to learn Latin!  And SPEAK it!  I love that there are people who teach students to speak Latin in schools across America.  I hate the idea that most schools teach Latin as a study of root words.  Why can't we speak it??

The next step was to add a parallel character and follow the same pattern, but this time you have more facts to confirm and talk about.  Just another way to add reps.

The last thing we practiced was "forgetting" to tell the class about something that happened earlier.  In our example story, we flashed back to how the girl got her bad cat.

Michelle Kindt was our coach in the session, and she told us that we could set our phones to buzz in our pockets every minute or 5 minutes for things that we forget to do, like comprehension checks or grammar pop-ups.  I don't know how to set my phone up to do this, so if anyone knows how to get an iPhone to do this, let me know!