Recently I discussed our challenge to create here in
CICFO. To work on it we’ve been
re-telling familiar stories, the most recent of which is Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Since ‘Goldilocks’ was doomed to cause unnecessary confusion, we just called
her ‘the girl’. Those words are much
more widely applicable. I have a set of
storyboard punch-outs; the kids took turns two at a time, one telling part of
the story and the other writing it on the whiteboard. Some of the kids need to see and copy it, but
everyone got to write down at least a short part of the story themselves. I had my doubts, but the reason I’ve
continued this is because the kids like it.
They think it’s fun and it gets them up in front of the class writing which
allows the other kids to see that everyone forgets their periods, or
capitalizes random letters, or forgets to add an ‘s’ when something is
plural. It lets the kids know that it’s
okay when they make mistakes while reinforcing the corrections; at least, I
think that’s what it is doing. As usual,
some kids are very good at this and some kids just really enjoy writing on the
board. It takes a couple classes to
finish a story and on the last day of The
Three Bears, Sarong came in and sat right in front of me and told me a ‘Once
Upon a Time’ story featuring her friend Channy.
It was short and simple and a little bit ridiculous, but the most
important part is that it was unprovoked.
I didn’t have to hold up cards and have her use one of them in a
sentence, I didn’t ask her to tell me a story, I didn’t lead her by the hand
and tell her how—none of that—she just did it.
I asked her to write it down later. It goes like this:
“Once upon a time the girl named Channy she like to play
with the cat. The cats named mickey
mouse. Channy goes to school by walking.
“
It’s no epic, but she did it by herself. I helped her a little bit on the spelling,
but for the most part I exaggerated the phonemes and made her figure out the
spelling on her own. The other kids
followed her lead and started making up bits about eachother. I paired kids who had already done it with
those who were struggling, absolutely thrilled with what they were doing
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