Sensei, I don't have a story to tell...speaker's block & interrogative teaching

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casually mentioned I was trying to teach "The Narrative Tenses" last Thursday evening, via Swarm,  and then had a bit of a 'mare doing so. Friend, inspiration and twitter vivant +Michael @mickstout promptly asked me about resources to do so. Oh hell, called out!

Back story = used to employ a DELTA-qualified teacher whose every second sentence was about teaching the narra'ive tenses (Geordie), how good he was at it (them?) and that we should all d'off caps & bend a knee to the genius before us. But seeing as we have never had that many students in the rarefied reaches of advanced storytelling...you do need a bit for YLE Movers but you can generally get by without having to display any grasp of the past perfect simple/past perfect continuous/etc...in fact if you even tried, I think the speaking examiner would shake your hand!

This particular class week was missing the storytellers, instead only the 'answers on the next page already filled in' students had turned up. Any story telling they do attempt is in L1. My 'pardon?' usually gets a 'No, no' + dismissive hand wave. Been there? Can never introduce something stealthily or creatively because my thunder eternally stolen "that's on p45"...

Nuts & bolts of had + past participle etc all diligently underlined. But grasping the actual concept? Timelines, arrows, arm waving...Jim sensei needed to hit reset and start again.

So not only scratching my head all week about how to rescue the befuddled students from last week's grammatical cul de sac, needed to actually impress a colleague as well - or at least try to reply.

My students share the same language, and are not natural story tellers nor inquisitors. Imagine the opposite of Irish or Italian, maybe? Any contribution usually delivered as a set piece, accepted universally & scarcely a comment or question there be afterwards.

As usual, simplest is best, and decided after rummaging my collection of supplementary materials that nothing was really going to present itself. I needed to detox the class from the dreaded G terminology & translation mindset, and in some parlance flip the classroom. Keep books in bags, concentrate on imaginative brain, banish pencils, avoid turn-taking & prevent dominant personalities railroading others. Time too for me to be quite a lot more intrusive than I usually am (inviting fluency and letting 'errors' go).

A board game with out story telling limits

Solution. A narrative.

Dived into the back of our games cupboard & found Never Ending Stories (sorry, that awful song will start in your brains too!) - for age 6+ it says on the box. Ideal. Very simple. Totally random. Players plop cards onto a board in turn, and develop a story as suggested by the images on them (characters, objects, locations) in the order they have been played. Past tenses great. But the 'forgotten' past?

Start at the end of the story and add cards to try to get to the beginning, back-filling detail as you go. This is where the teacher needs to be very involved asking for connections, suggesting links, checking/requiring details eg Were they married before? What happened? How did they meet? and letting the whole group contribute - player whose turn it is selects 'best help' and adds the bits up. Importantly, before the next turn, teacher as narrator recaps - helping everyone keep up with developments and providing a model. Embellishment with current events etc as they occur to you are great, as students then get to see the rationale for the tenses you are using, without focusing on the tenses you are using per se - at least if the story is interesting! I challenge anyone to recount the same (and ever expanding) story the same way twice without leaving bits out; students need to see this is the beauty of storytelling not the mental linear blockage some see it as. Grammatical flexibility gets you over the hurdle and you can 'keep going' without having to go all the way back to the beginning of the timeline and get things 'in order' Students love pointing out the teacher's mistakes....ask them if you left something out...and 'rescue' yourself with a post script.

How our story unfolded - narrative to come

So, for me, interrupt like mad at the creative brainstorming phase, establish chronology and link bits together grammatically - then let that part of the story be told however it comes out. Once a turn is 'done'; gently re-tell it to check you got it right (include 'corrections' here?), and help the other students with a second listening before connecting all the other previous parts.

So there has to be a digital way to do this, for classes with wifi & tech savvy learners.Voicethread would be one way to collate a final version, I think, and could be done outside of class/before the next class. Sock Puppet, minus the time limit, another idea. Fotobabble only gives you 90 seconds - but ideal per pic?

In class, with confident students I think a Pecha Kucha type approach might work. You could also trawl ELTpics or any theme in Flickr - or go random and use flickr as a screensaver (hands free, adjust time images shown to suit skills).

Another randomiser = give a student a slip of paper with a ridiculous scenario on it and have them bluster their way out of it - kind of Liar's Game. (eg "You were seen climbing out of a nightclub window at 8am this morning wearing a superman suit")  Of course allow questions from the floor. Big class, have 2 or 3 students sit at the front and have them tell a story. Only one is true, room votes at end of story & Q/A on which one. NB They can all be false, but the winner = most convincing liar?!

Making an alphabet book - not gone digital yet!

Rummaging for Es

One problem I think all teachers have is making sure kids don't forget their ABCs when they are learning PQR, or their a/e/i/o/u when looking at b/d/g/p etc. Remember you can only do something for 10 mins with kids (I disagree, actually, if you get the activity right ie with variety inbuilt)...you only get 45 minutes a week, and it has to be fun, and do songs, and not get anybody trampled, and somebody's got a nosebleed?!

Last year I saw Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto show how she made a digital A-Z booklet, which I liked very much (using Voicethread). My little charges are not quite there yet for tech, so we have been cobbling together an analogue one instead (we'll scan them later and go web 2.0 then). I like this little scheme as we are recycling the flashcards & everyone ends up with a different mix i.e. each is unique. It is an ongoing little project for the next few weeks - with glue and crayons and everything. (I didn't want to go entirely homemade as the drawing can be unpredicatbly abstract with learners this age - cute of course, but a bit hard to use again later!)

End product will be a handmade A-Z dictionaries with loads of meaning for their owners...this teacher couldn't avoid the fun of making his own :)

The Magic Key - Yuta helps Jim narrate

Haruka helps Jim read: Castle Adventure

Using Voicethread with graded readers

It is possible, if you work frantically, to have a full scale Voicethread production of a graded reader, such as OUP's Story Tree orange level one seen here, up and published in an hour.

We did not get into this 'cold'. Students have been asked to listen to the CD and to read along at home. This is not homework as such, but our efforts at an extensive reading programme. A book a month is a very gentle commitment I think!

We have also 'milked' this source heavily - it is full of verbs in the past tense - regular and irregular - which we have worked on previously eg using a word cloud to retell the story as best we could & to find the verbs in their past form > write the present tense form. We have also identified how to pronounce the three different /ed/ endings (from the CD).

I gave my boys the camera and asked them to find some of the main 'ingredients' in our story. Those things we couldn't photograph we drew quick pictures eg museum & shop. The students were assigned characters to speak for (reading ahead skills) and then Jim's quick keyboard skills were needed to find the right images/press record etc. We were against time pressure so we did not go back and edit - so what you hear is very much what we did. Pauses are there when someone wandered off thinking they'd finished!

Image via CrunchBaseI hope you'll take a few minutes to follow the link over to Voicethread and leave a comment yourself for us (or leave us a note here). Personally, I think this is a lovely (free) tool that teachers should be able to exploit easily for this kind of personalisation. Involves everyone in a production that would otherwise stay 'hidden' in the book. Performing brings out the characters and imagination, and a lasting finished product is something they can share & go back to with pride. All our classes work is linked for parents to discover on Edmodo too, which if you have not thought about using for classes yet, I'd take a look. We love it!

Animal Adventure - our game on Voicethread

In pre-school this morning we had fun playing an animal adventure board game, and I thought you'd like to hear how well our team could play! (They were very patient while Jim messed around on the computer - thank you guys!)

We love Voicethread for this kind of interaction between students, as it gives them a real sense of achievement & ownership. It is also a wonderful chronicle for them to cherish. Real Player also allows you to download/convert to eg iPhone, which is pretty funky!

Would love to hear your comments...add them. Follow this link (couldn't load to Blogger for some reason today).

Harry Potter voicethread project

by Yuhi & Remi :)


http://voicethread.com/share/1285615/

Idle iPhone designs

Yuta was the only one to turn up to class today - it's been very hot and the holiday season is looming...

Rather than give him a hard time with the books, I showed him how to draw a simple picture on my iPhone; as you can see, he got the hang of it pretty quickly! We then imported the images to VoiceThread and made the cool slideshow above, adding captions, comments and our little chat. He did most of the work himself, and looked rather chuffed with the result.

Fool on his classmates for not turning up! We had a ball! Thanks Yuta - goo job :)

Pirates of the Caribbean - Curse of the Black Pearl

voicethread by Yuya

http://voicethread.com/share/1217473/

(just click on the title to go to the link)

Elvis voicethread

Please listen to my voicethread. It's about Elvis Presley. He was very famous rock'n'roller.

Carla Crocodile goes to see the King - read along with Jim