Reading with Carol Gaab

I had a lot of fun in this meeting just messing with Carol...I tweeted a pic of her as my woman crush Wednesday (#wcw) and just laughed at how awesome she is.

I took a ton of notes!  Carol linked most things right back to the 5Cs of the national standards.

The first point that Carol made was to be as authentic as possible.  Speak with the same intonations as a native speaker.  Use the same hand gestures.  This fits under Comparisons as students start to notice the difference in your normal persona and the persona for the target language.  She also said that we must speak in a normal pace, but use pauses to allow students to catch up.  This way we are already training our kids to listen to the speed of native speech.  I really liked this idea because I know that I speak really slowly and my kids have a hard time making the leap to natural speech.

Carol uses 4 types of questions when checking comprehension for a story or a reading.  This really adds some interest and variety and NOVELTY to our circling and questioning.

1. Ask comprehension/pop-ups like we normally do
2. PQA: these don't have to be specifically about the students but could be about what interests them instead.  Either way, you are connecting to the students.
3. Cultural questions: what is the difference between what we just read and what we experience here?
4. Inference: Carol uses a wonderful thing called "Probable or Possible"  In this way, we are training kids how to infer, one of the main purposes of Common Core literacy strategies.

Using these 4 types of questions, we looked at the same reading for over an hour, and it was not even the least bit boring.  Could be just Carol's personality, but I can't wait to try this out in the classroom.

Carol suggests taking the text, breaking it into smaller pieces and putting those pieces on a PowerPoint (or something similar).  She then makes symbols for each type of question she is going to ask and then she puts those symbols in the presentation.  

During these presentations, she puts in a bunch of weird tangents, such as real-life facts (she managed to fit in facts about heart transplants and I can't remember the connection to the story, but it fit very well, culture (if the story was about a dog, she would give quick one-sentence facts about the Chihuahua, which gives the kids a cultural connection and a bit of non-fiction information), celebrities (if the reading is about family, she might show a picture of a well-known family and talk about it for a minute).  

I have a note and cannot remember exactly what the activity was, so if you were there and can help me (or if I read it in another blog, I will update this blog)...I have written down to give kids visuals and have them stand as you say their word and when they screw up, have them do it again so you get more reps.  Sounds pretty easy, but I don't have a visual/memory in my head of exactly what this looked like.

Carol spent the rest of the day talking about pre-reading activities.  First, she has kids make emotional connections and uses a character trait chart to decide which traits are probable or possible based on the title, the cover, and the summary of the book.  

I have another note that I remember, but I don't exactly remember when she uses it.  She has kids write down words in English on a Post-It that they need for a discussion, then they either put those on the board or she walks around as they are in partner work, writing the word in Spanish on the paper.  Very great for differentiation.  

Next, Carol showed us the Reading Action Chain: she took a quick 5-sentence story and projected it.  First, we talked about what we thought went first, then second.  Instead of picking a correct answer, the class discussed it to get more reps.  Once that had been discussed, she would hand out cards with each sentence while those students with a card took turns acting out that sentence and the rest of the class guessed which of the projected sentences it was.  This is just a ton of repetitions getting kids to say the sentences and READ them on the projection screen.  I think one of my biggest failures as a TPRS teacher in the past few years is that I have projected the whole story at a time.  I need to change my readings for next year to add NOVELTY.

The next pre-reading story we did (talking about pets) was to split into the 4 corners depending on what pet we would enjoy owning.  Once we had that, we discussed the answers and then added some inference questions.  Which group wants a pet that eats other pets?  Which group wants a pet that eats a lot?  Which pet eats the most?  Again, there were some heated discussions, especially about the last questions, but Carol never gave us the answer (in fact, she said that if the kids didn't drop the argument, she would assign as homework to find out the answer, such as "Which pet eats more: a dog or a snake).  

In discussions, Carol is always trying to insert indirect object pronouns naturally.  For example, if the reading is "Tarzan picked up Jane," she will say "So, Tarzan picked her up."  The kids don't have to think so much about what's going on because it's so comprehensible.  

Once the reading has been beaten to death with all of the tangents and PQA, etc, she adds her student actors and highlights adverbs.  How does he pick her up?  How does she answer?  As the students add these details, she types them into the reading.

Whew...we're still on pre-reading activities.  Carol took the text from chapter 1 and put it in a word cloud (wordle.net) to highlight what words were repeated the most and had kids come up with a one sentence summary for the chapter (Ours was Brandon wants a dog from Brandon Brown Wants a Dog) and a prediction for who the main character is.  She has a chart where they fill in these predictions and then re-visits them after they read chapter 1.  

Next, we talked about Comprehensible Input through Comprehension Illustrations.  Carol takes the illustrations from the chapters and the class discusses dialogue, plot, predictions, etc.  They repeat potential dialogue, changing to tone to see how they think the character said it.  (How does your mom say that?)

Once all of this is done, Carol pulls out five plot-driven sentences and we do the sequencing activity again, but this time with colored sentence strips (blank) and color-coded sentences.  Once the class has agreed on the sequencing, Carol has them write a sentence between each of those sentences to add details and fill out the story.

Next, she has students come up with a 6-word memoir for the main character, based on what they have predicted from the pre-reading activities.  For our example, I came up with "I'm a boy without a dog."  You could also take 6-word memoirs like that written by others and use them as a guessing game for the students to guess who would write that memoir.

To teach kids summarizing skills, you can summarize a few paragraphs and then have students match the summaries with the appropriate paragraphs.

We can talk about who said blank and to whom?  How did he/she say it?  We can sneak in the conditional and ask "Who would say....?"

Post reading, we can do Review Charades where the students still have the books and a student acts out a specific sentence from the reading.  Students have to guess the EXACT sentence that is being acted out.  

Carol does something called Freeze-Frame snapshots where she gives a group of 3 a sentence from the reading and they have 3 seconds (or so) to come up with a visual to go with that sentence before the camera clicks and the scene is finalized.

We can vote superlatives for the characters à la the Yearbook (Most likely to...)

And finally, Reader's Theater, which I explained in great detail last year in this blog post.

Whew!  I think that's all that I have in my notes.  That's why I LOVE a Carol Gaab session.  She has a million ideas to add NOVELTY to our classroom and keep kids on the edge of their seats.  Sorry for the long post, but there was too much good stuff to stop.