Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year

Foundations A Natural Approach to the Transition Year A Guide to the First Year of Stepping Stones Description, Narration, Information, & End-of-the-Year Projects

By Tina Hargaden © 2021 Tina Hargaden, CI Liftoff

A Note from the Author This book picked me up by the scruff of the neck in May of 2017, demanding to be written, at the end of my happiest-ever year in the classroom. It woke me up early in the morning and poured out into the computer as if I was not even the one in charge. I really wasn’t the one in charge. It was like the content came from somewhere else and I just happened to be the one whose fingers were pressing the keys to get it on the page to share with others, step-by-step instructions on what was working so very well in my classroom those days.

I would run to the book, right from class, and add fresh-from-the-classroom insights, sometimes sitting in the bus or train going to and from school, literally over the river and through the woods. This book is based, in part, upon the incredible power of Ben Slavic’s uniquely student-centered, extremely engaging approach to world language instruction. This approach is also deeply informed by the literacy work of Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Both Ben and Lucy have opened up the classroom to student voice, choice, and direction. I will be forever grateful to their passion for meeting students where they are and guiding them to the next level, using their own kid interests and kid lives as the ladder to get them there. Without their vision, you would not be holding this book and I would not be the happy teacher that I am today.

This book brings the first edition, A Natural Approach to the Year (also known as ANATTY and Year One) up to date with the curricular framework that I developed towards the end of writing the first edition. It thus aligns this foundational book with Stepping Stones, most notably in the addition of the cycles of instruction, the daily instructional framework, and updated, much more useful assessment materials aligned to the genres of three of the six instructional cycles that comprise the Stepping Stones framework: Description, Narration, and Information. Stepping Stones is a powerful curricular framework that solves many problems that teachers have had for decades, in working to align comprehension-based instruction with what works in today’s schools. I am so pleased to share the foundations of Stepping Stones with you in this book.

Tina Hargaden Portland, OR February 27, 2021

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Table of Contents Part One - The Foundations of Instruction Page 5 Page 6 Page 16 Page 23 Page 35 Page 63 Page 69

The Purpose of This Book Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: How to Use This Book Chapter Three: Setting up the Classroom Chapter Four: Classroom Management Chapter Five: Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies Chapter Six: Your Gradebook

Part Two - The Instructional Sessions Page 92

Chapter Seven: Beginning the Year

Page 98 Page 123 Page 136 Page 147 Page 160 Page 177

Cycle One Phase One: Describing Settings Session 1: Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) Session 2: Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) Session 3: Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) Session 4: Lesson on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Session 5: Card Talk (or Slide Talk) on Places We Like Session 6: Visual Survey on Fun Places

Page 190 Page 212 Page 222

Cycle One Phase Two: Describing Preferences Session 7: Class Survey on Activities/Sports We Like Session 8: Card Talk (or Slide Talk) on Weird Chores We Have to Do Session 9: Community Survey on School Subjects You Like and Don’t Like

Page 230 Page 238 Page 261

Cycle One Phase Three: Describing People Inside and Out Session 10: Visual Lecture: What We Are Like Session 11: One Word Images (Making and Describing a Class Character) Session 12: Picture Talk: Our Heroes

Page 270 Page 280 Page 289

Cycle One Phase Four: Describing in the Past and Present Session 13: Baby Picture Talk Session 14: Class Survey: When We Were Little Session 15: Visual Survey: Old School Tech

Page 301 Page 313

Cycle Two Phase One: Narrating Personal Stories Session 16: Story Mountain: Why I Became a Teacher Session 17: Card Talk (or Slide Talk): Good and Bad Trips We Have Taken

Page 325 Page 346

Cycle Two Phase Two: Narrating Imaginative Stories Session 18: Visual Story: La Cité des Dames (or another literary work in your language) Session 19: Creating a Class Story about One of Our Class Characters

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Page 381

Cycle Two Phase Three: Narrating Cultural Stories Session 20: Visual Story: Renart et les jambons d’Ysengrin (or another culturally-significant folktale, legend, or story in your language) Session 21: Thought Bubble Review

Page 388 Page 401 Page 409 Page 419 Page 429

Cycle Four Phase One: Organizing an Informational Paragraph Session 22: Academic Card Talk (or Slide Talk) Session 23: Picture Inquiry Session 24: Big Book Session 25: Visual Syllabus Session 26: Pictorial Input Chart

Page 436 Page 444 Page 458 Page 465 Page 474 Page 487

Cycle Four Phase Two: Incorporating Topic-Specific Vocabulary Session 27: Word Card Review Session 28: Reverse Movie Talk Session 29: Class Expert Group Pages Session 30: Class Mind Map Session 30.1: Expert Group Reading Days Session 31: Process Grid

Page 497 Page 501 Page 507 Page 522

End-of-the-Year Options Option 1: Festival of Worksheets Option 2: The Word-Off Option 3: Story Books Project Option 4: Class Yearbooks

Page 370

Appendices (Digital Downloads: QR code to access) Appendix A: Appendix B: Appendix C: Appendix D: Appendix E: Appendix F: Appendix G: Appendix H: Appendix I: Appendix J: Appendix K: Appendix L: Appendix M: Appendix N:

Do-Nows and Bellringers Human Resources Manual Suggested Daily Lesson Framework for Block Schedules Performance Descriptors Rubrics and Writing Continuum for Description Rubrics and Writing Continuum for Narration Rubrics and Writing Continuum for Information Laying the Groundwork for Free-Choice Reading Free-Choice Reading Sheets Learning Logs and Choice Menus Using Grammar Discussions as Noticing Activities and PACE Lessons Comic Book Template Lesson on Second Language Acquisition Anchor Charts

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The Purpose of This Book This book is designed to be your yearlong instructional companion. It will lead you through a year of instruction that can be used in beginner classes all the way up through your highest levels. As you work through the book, my goals for you are: 1. Understand the reasons for comprehension-based teaching, the hypotheses that inform this approach, and how it is aligned to standards and cross-curricular literacy objectives 2. Understand the structure of the Stepping Stones curricular framework, and use three out of the six cycles that comprise the yearlong framework. These cycles are aligned to literacy functions/genres (Description, Narration, and Information), with four phases per cycle aligned to “literacy foci” within that genre (e.g. within Description: Describing Settings, Describing Preferences, Describing People Inside and Out, Describing Past and Present, or within Narration: Narrating Personal Stories, Narrating Imaginative/ Fictional Stories, Narrating Cultural Stories, Narrating Historical Stories) 3. Understand the Stepping Stones Daily Instructional Framework: a daily sequence of instruction that follows a “gradual release of responsibility” or “I Do, We Do, You Do” model 4. Develop a repertoire of instructional strategies as you work through the lessons, so that you can easily plan your own lessons using simple strategies that fit within the daily framework and yearlong structure, so that you can easily work with the more extensive information in Stepping Stones, when you are ready to go deeper 5. Understand how to collect daily assessments and grades and how to collect and assess work samples and maintain portfolios to assess students’ growth over time in reading, listening, writing, and speaking and help students see growth and set goals 6. Make comprehension-based teaching easier, more structured, and less complicated than it generally is for teachers new to this approach, as well as those who have been collecting strategies and ideas for years, without a clear picture of how everything might fit together across lessons, units, years, and throughout your language program.

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Chapter 1: Introduction There is currently a paradigm shift happening in language teaching, led by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and a vibrant, growing community of teachers engaged in implementing practices derived from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research findings. For the past few decades, this community has been hard at work developing and refining various proficiency-based language instruction methods. Many teachers are now shifting the focus of their programs away from conscious study of language and towards a communicative, holistic approach designed to build acquired competence, true

and lasting language proficiency.

The work of this wave of early adopters and brave pioneers and innovators, and the enthusiastic community that has grown out of their early successes, accounts for this shift. The profession is moving away from instructing languages as if memorizing a verb chart, learning a word list, or filling in worksheets could result in true language proficiency. The ACTFL standards guide us to use the whole language in meaningful ways, ways that align with SLA research, in order to build true, lasting proficiency, for all our students, not just the few. Further, the Seal of Biliteracy requires students to develop a higher level of proficiency than is most people will achieve through conscious study alone.

The Promise The community of proficiency-oriented teachers is growing at an ever-increasing pace. The internet has accelerated this growth, as colleagues are able to easily share ideas, successes, and samples of student work. Proficiency-based teaching has spread from one happy teacher to another, as teachers taking up this new paradigm have been happily surprised at how their students’ language abilities have soared. In many cases, first-year students from proficiency-based classrooms are able to comprehend, write, and speak at levels far above what traditionally has been expected of beginning language students.

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Teachers also find themselves working smarter, not harder, able to leave school while the sun is still up. They can leave work at work and significantly reduce their grading and correcting time.

Teachers are often motivated by the substantial increase in student engagement they see. When communicating about interesting topics - and not studying parts of language - becomes the curriculum, most students are naturally more engaged in class. Many teachers report that proficiency-based instruction has

helped them to reconnect with the joy of teaching. Their students are more engaged, and able to do more with the language, and feeling more successful and accomplished. Engaged, successful students usually feel more motivation. Teaching people who are internally-motivated is - for most of us - much more enjoyable than working hard to make grammar and vocabulary interesting.

It is a testament to the power of proficiency-based teaching that most of the growth in interest has come horizontally in our profession from word of mouth, and not from top-down mandates. It is a grassroots movement inside school hallways, from one classroom to another, from one building to another.

At the time of this writing, districts and departments that offer a fully proficiency-based program are few and far between. The change is still happening mostly at the level of individual teachers. In fact, many teachers are bravely shifting their programs to align with standards, research, human nature, and true communication despite their district requirements. These teachers are heroes, in my estimation, brave fighters on behalf of students, who often suffer greatly at the hands of district and building administrators and colleagues who have not yet made the shift to standards- and research-based proficiency-oriented instruction. I know that my own journey with this kind of instruction has not always been lined with cheering unicorns tossing rose petals at me in ticker-tape parades thrown in my honor by grateful colleagues and bosses. It has been joyful…yet challenging.

I developed the Stepping Stones instructional framework in response to the challenges I faced in fitting student-centered, proficiency-oriented language teaching into the expectations of my colleagues - making this natural, effortless way of learning a language “look and feel like school.” It’s an all-too-common problem for so many teachers.

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The Problem The research shows that exchanging meaningful, interesting messages is the path to language proficiency.

However, many teachers who wish to align with the standards and research find themselves unable to do so in their day-to-day instruction, because they are pressured to have their students consciously learn certain language parts. Many teachers thus find themselves in a difficult professional situation, as they work to implement the following important ideas.

The difficulty comes when teachers who want to fully align their programs with the standards and SLA research are required to teach word lists, follow a textbook scope and sequence, or prepare students for

assessments of grammatical accuracy and linguistic knowledge. These requirements are thick heavy cords weighing teachers down, tethering them to ineffective practices and impeding their ability to provide the building blocks of language acquisition through comprehensible interactions in the language.

Year after year, generation after generation, students show up in language classes eager to use the language, but the vast majority of them leave at the end of the year with their heads full of unconnected words and rules, and worse, a feeling that they are “not very good at languages”. The feeling is of having participated in something resembling a mathematics class, learning formulae to manipulate parts of the language they never even knew existed - definite articles, indefinite articles, the partitive, past participles, etc.

Many pacing guides and curriculum documents still reflect the structure of the textbook, its thematic word sets and grammar points. Some districts have cobbled together the new, researchaligned proficiency goals with the old textbook-driven word lists and grammar points. Many documents now delineate proficiency Page 8

goals for each year of study alongside word lists and grammar constructions to be learned at that proficiency level. These documents only partially align with the research and our national standards.

The Curricular Framework You Hold in Your Hands The proficiency-oriented Stepping Stones curricular framework offers an alternative. It connects our national standards to the way languages are actually acquired: by comprehending and processing language input through listening and reading, and allowing speech and writing to emerge at the Novice level, which is to say at the level of one-word or phrase-length utterances, and then the Intermediate level, which is to say beginning to use connected strings of sentences, and then at the Advanced level, using well-organized, more formal discourse styles. It aligns with research and standards, not with the financial interests of for-profit textbook companies. There is not a lot of profit to be made in selling a simple curriculum whose goal is to put student interests at the center of the material to be covered and to foster true communication in the language.

Stepping Stones is cost-effective, requiring only a trained teacher to lead the class, basic art materials, and a classroom library of interesting reading material. In fact, educators who implement a truly research- and standards-based curriculum will most likely find themselves dramatically reducing the materials expenditures in their buildings each adoption cycle. Instead, they can use some of that budget to train their teachers in speaking comprehensibly to their classes and also to purchase high-interest, level-appropriate reading material for free-choice reading, to support true literacy in world language programs.

The Simplicity of This Work

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Teachers who have a firm grasp on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and who understand the intent of the ACTFL standards will want to provide their students with opportunities to interact with comprehensible messages – linguistic data that builds a mental representation of the language, which leads to true proficiency.

This is the work of building acquired competence. It is an unconscious process that happens almost by magic, in an immutable and unknown order, in a part of brain that works on such intricate levels that the conscious mind could never hope to match it, and on each individual student’s unique timeline. The students’ mental representation of the language is built from spoken and written messages that they have comprehended. All that is necessary is that the students focus on the message and not concern themselves at all with the language that is used for its delivery.

Thus, the whole language that encodes the messages is the ingredient for language acquisition. We can literally talk about anything, using any words that come up, using comprehensible language, and students will build language proficiency. They will develop acquired competence, the kind of competence that allows them - after enough language input - to effortlessly use the language.

They will never acquire this ability through conscious study, or building learned competence. This I know from personal experience. In the lesson on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), in Instructional Session 4, you will learn more about my own experiences as a whiz-kid grammar grinder and vocabulary machine in high school Latin and French, and my subsequent fall from the precarious heights within my own self-estimation as a Real Good French Student, when I found myself lonesome and awkward, unable to do much with all the plus-que-parfait and Vandertramp Verbs that I had dutifully laid by in my brain for just such an occasion (and Xavier, if you are reading this, I wanted to flirt with you!).

I was a whiz-bang grammar learner, a straight-A French student, but all I was left with at the end of the day was learned competence. And that wasn’t what I needed, if I was going to have any hope whatsoever of seeing if Xavier was flirting with me, or if it was all in my o’er-French’d head. What I needed was acquired competence. Acquired competence, and willing conversation partner, that is! So, looks like my lack of ACQUIRED competence pretty much ruined my chances of potentially acquiring a dashing and sparkly French boy as a boyfriend, or at the very least, a summer fling! What is the difference between this allimportant, and potentially life-altering, acquired competence and learned competence?

Conscious learning of grammar rules or vocabulary leads to learned competence, which is an entirely different process from language acquisition. Conscious knowledge can help students to edit and refine their speech and writing. But, in order to comfortably produce that speech and writing, students must first build acquired competence, so they can actually express themselves in the language. Processing comprehensible messages builds acquired competence, which leads to true language proficiency. It is the only path to the students’ being able to use the language.

What About Required Word Lists and Grammar?

Despite the copious findings of SLA research and the communicative focus of our standards, many districts or departments still require conscious learning — grammar rules and lists of words. In other situations, some Page 10

teachers have given themselves the goal of purposefully targeting high-frequency words, the most common words in their languages, with the worthy goal of providing their students repeated exposure to useful elements of the language so that they can begin using words like “has” and “is” and “wants” and “big” and “small” to build messages that express their own thoughts.

These word lists are unnecessary, however, as the natural, comprehensible use of the whole language will embed high-frequency words into the growing language system with no pre-planning. The only pre-planning that is truly necessary is your learning skills and strategies that enable you to use the language comprehensibly as you deliver experiences to your students. This book will lead you to learn and practice such skills as speaking slowly and comprehensibly, and using images, visual aids, voice intonation, gestures, body language, and realia to support the entire goal of communicative language instruction - student comprehension and interaction in the language.

Working through this book, you will learn and practice instructional strategies to deliver experiences that are conducted in comprehensible language. Activities such as creating characters, discussing the day’s schedule or weather, listening to stories - even singing songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes - can be used to deliver comprehensible messages to the students.

Until our district documents catch up with the research, we must separate our proficiency-based instruction from pre-chosen wordlists or grammar rules that might be imposed on our practice by others or by our own desire to “cover” or “teach” certain words or structures. Comprehensible input is the driver of language acquisition, but it is the wrong tool to teach specific elements of the language, word lists, etc.

It is a heavily-researched fact that comprehensible input doesn’t need any extra help to do its work of building acquired competence in students’ minds, and that it is easiest and most engaging when unfettered by wordlists and pacing guides. If we are required to teach certain wordlists or grammar points, however, then comprehensible input is not the right tool for that job. Communication works best when it is not constrained by the “grammar rule of the day,” as Dr. Stephen Krashen has called it.

We can simply use the language we teach in a supported and engaging conversational environment, so that each student can take from the stream of language the elements that they need at that particular time, to feed the growing linguistic system that they are unconsciously building in their minds. Then, in order to focus on required wordlists or grammar, we can use “Language Study Days” as explained in the Appendices, or perhaps a Word-Off or other conscious learning strategy, as explained in End-of-the-Year Option 2, to teach the conscious mind these conscious learning goals. The instructional sequence in this book is designed to provide a logical, engaging sequence of scaffolded, comprehensible language interactions whose goal is

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genuine communication in the language, not on using the language interactions as a vehicle for teaching the “grammar rule of the day.”

Some of the most common problems with teaching the “rule of the day” are: (1) Maintaining interest in repetitions of the pre-selected language can be a struggle for the teacher.

Further, the great effort required is not necessary, because the national standards do not require certain words or grammar to be acquired. The standards require only that students be able to comprehend and produce texts of increasing complexity as they progress through their language acquisition journey.

(2) Dr. Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis (explained below) states that students progress through a “natural order” of grammar points, and the order cannot be altered. Therefore, any specific elements we “target” in a given lesson will likely fall outside many students’ range of acquisition.

(3) Focusing on language elements can inhibit student interest in the messages.

(4) The effort required to sustain student interest in oftentimes unnatural or stilted language can take an emotional and energetic toll on teachers, who have jobs that are demanding enough without attempting to use the required structure “wanted to go,” or any other “rule,” enough times in the lesson, while also managing behavior, checking for comprehension, and keeping kids engaged.

For these reasons, it is recommended that class discussions not be used as a vehicle to teach certain language features. It is often difficult for the teacher and since students’ language acquisition devices might not be ready to uptake that particular “rule,” it could very well be a waste of time, anyway. If you need your students to consciously know things, it is generally much better just to go ahead and call in the conscious mind, so it can do what it does (memorize and analyze). This leaves the language acquisition to the unconscious mind, which is the only place where it actually happens, anyway.

If your school requires students to “know” or memorize certain features of the language, I strongly encourage you to simply take time away from the instructional sequence in this book to do so, perhaps using the suggestions on “Language Study Days” in the Appendices and End-of-the-Year Session 2, the Word-Off. You can address required vocabulary and grammar without having to fit certain words or structures into the day-today input…while at the same time thinking about what you are going to say next.

The Research Stepping Stones is based in large part on the research of Dr. Stephen Krashen, whose simple yet earthshattering hypotheses have not yet been disproven - after almost forty years - and to which I hew as closely as possible in my work. These hypotheses are explained in my own words below:

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Conscious learning about a language, including memorizing and learning and manipulating grammar paradigms, is a separate process in the brain from unconsciously acquiring a language. In order to build long-lasting proficiency, where using the language to communicate is the goal, teachers must teach for acquisition, not learning. Acquired proficiency comes from our internal mental representation of the language, a linguistic system we build in our minds, not from learned facts, lists, and formulae.

Understanding comprehensible messages (in spoken and, for literate students, written form) is the cause of language acquisition. There is no other way to feed the Language Acquisition Device (posited by linguist Noam Chomsky) the data that it needs to build a mental representation of the language.

The Monitor is our self-editing, or self-correcting function. It is useful for helping us produce grammaticallycorrect writing or correct speech. However, the Monitor can also impede our willingness to take risks and try using language. In the beginning stages of language acquisition, teachers should focus on communicating, not accuracy, and avoid correcting students’ attempts at output.

Language is best acquired when students are relaxed and focused on something interesting and pleasant. A classroom environment that keeps affective filters low, thus, is key for optimal language acquisition to occur.

This suggests that we need to make all our students feel as comfortable and successful as possible, celebrate success, smile at them, and cultivate a warm, relaxed, focused, and stress-free environment.

Grammatical features of languages are acquired in a natural order that cannot be changed by instruction.

Students can learn about features of the language (e.g. the difference between the verbs ser and estar or how to form the past tenses) in any order, but true acquisition of the features is not under our conscious Page 13

control. Students progress along the natural order in the same order, but at different paces. We should thus provide our classes with the most complex language that they can still understand (which in the beginning is provided at a very slow pace, with lots of scaffolding such as pictures or translations or visual aids), so that students at all their different stages along the natural order of acquisition can all take linguistic data that helps them to grow their mental representation of the language.

The Vision Dr. Krashen’s vision of comprehensible input - whole-language, meaningful, interesting instruction for world languages - aligns with our national standards. That information can empower us to work within our systems to shift the local standards more into alignment with the type of input Dr. Krashen recommends as superior input that prioritizes communication and whole language over specific language parts.

With ACTFL leading the way away from the ineffective form-focused language instruction of the past, and with local teachers helping to shift the conversation towards our national standards and the research on how we learn languages, eventually we will become free of faulty standards and gain the unfettered ability to teach in a natural and much more enjoyable way, by providing comprehensible, community-building, and creative experiences to our students. This book lays down a suggested roadmap for that type of instruction.

Here you have a scope and sequence for a year of uncluttered, proficiency-based language instruction and assessment of students’ acquired competence, their proficiency in using the language for communication. If teachers had the full freedom to align only with the national standards, this could change language classrooms into community-building creative spaces more resembling a Montessori or Waldorf or Dewian school - those visionary radical education reformers of the Progressive Era - than the form-focused classrooms that most of us inhabited in our school careers as beginner language learners.

Advocating for Change My sincere hope is that professional language educators across the nation will begin to feel emboldened and compelled to educate their administrators, communities, and districts about best practices in world language education. In many programs, the students themselves see the results of a proficiency-based approach and begin advocating for change in their later language courses, where they see less-effective and less-engaging teaching methods being used. It is my hope as well that teachers will begin harnessing the power of their students and their parents to advocate shoulder-to-shoulder with them in pressuring the districts and states to rewrite their documents to support and even encourage a completely proficiency-based approach.

This is a fight worth investing time, toil, and energy into. It is a question of aligning our practices with the research on language acquisition. It is also a question of equity. Many students, especially our most academically-vulnerable students, do not find success with traditional grammar-based approaches. Who can blame them? Filling out a worksheet to learn to manipulate a certain grammar rule is not inherently motivating to many people. Several districts that have made the switch to proficiency-based instruction have found that students from historically-underserved backgrounds have begun making higher grades and are continuing on to higher levels of language study than they were with traditional grammar approaches.

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Until we change our district or state requirements, many teachers who are joining the growing ranks of proficiency-based instructors will need to pursue dual goals in their classroom - fostering language acquisition through devoting as much time as possible to exchanges of comprehensible messages at the students’ level while also preparing their students to succeed on grammar-based district assessments and align with their traditional colleagues.

We are in the midst of a historic time period in world language education. Interest in proficiency-based teaching is at an all-time high, and . There is currently a proliferation of ideas on using more of our languages in the classroom. Even the most staunch traditionalists are becoming aware that they need to incorporate more language interaction in their instruction.

We teachers who already have made the commitment to providing our students with the ingredient for language acquisition - the actual language itself - are in the first wave of change. This is a privileged position.

We owe it to tomorrow’s teachers, and especially to their future students, to advocate for, and strongly, a more equitable, joyful, heart-centered, and effective approach to equipping our youngsters for global human communication. We have been given a gift. It is the gift of awareness, of vision, of inspiration. As John Dewey himself has said, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

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Chapter 2: How to Use This Book The Stepping Stones curricular framework is backwards planned from student proficiency outcomes and cross-curricular literacy goals, and not from grammar points or wordlists. ACTFL provides us with curricular goals that are based on using the language, not learning about the language, and the Performance Descriptors and Can-Do Statements give us a roadmap to proficiency and guidance on how to assess student progress in listening, reading, writing, and speaking performance.

Thus, our national professional organization - and SLA research - recommend a whole-language approach, and does not recommend that students study certain word lists or grammatical constructions. ACTFL’s guidance focuses on communication over form: taking in information and making oneself understood, interacting with increasingly complex text, and deepening thinking skills and habits of mind.

The General Trajectory of a School Year The cyclical nature of the academic term is one of the great joys of the teaching profession. The school year has a life of its own. It is full of fresh starts, of chances to reinvent ourselves. Every term, the wheel begins its great turn again, and we fasten our seatbelts to see what kind of ride this one will be.

This book is organized to help you navigate the realities of how the term tends to go. It will help you establish a routine in your class and also to keep things fresh and novel by introducing new activities and new twists on old activities as the term goes on.

This combination of novelty within the routine is key to good classroom management. When students know what to expect, but also learn to expect novelty within the familiar structure of class, they are comfortable and engaged. Comfortable, engaged students are generally much easier to manage than uncomfortable, confused, or bored students.

The curricular framework is organized to help you bring freshness and novelty to your instruction, to keep the students engaged throughout the term. We all know that engagement waxes and wanes depending on the time of day, the month, the season, and the year. Everyone’s energy and enthusiasm is high at the beginning of the term: pencils are sharp, erasers pink, apples polished, and back to school clothes are pressed and fresh. At that time, we usually do not need to work too hard to captivate their students’ attention. In the first weeks of class, typical students will listen attentively to the most mundane utterances, mesmerized by the fact that they can comprehend a new language, or pleasantly surprised at how much they can do with the language after the break.

As the term goes on, and your students need novelty to help them maintain their enthusiasm for listening to the language, the strategies shift and provide new activities that build upon the routines you have already established. By the end of the term or year, when your students’ attention spans have waned from months of Page 16

work and growth, and you are tired and longing for a break, you can use the End-of-the-Year sessions that require less and less energy from you while providing much-needed novelty and interest for your students, and still keep the comprehensible language flowing.

The purpose of Stepping Stones is to guide you in providing high-quality proficiency-based instruction, authentic assessment that is aligned to proficiency standards, and, perhaps most importantly, to help you protect your own mental health. The goal is to help you make your job enjoyable, easy, relaxing, and fun, so that you can continue touching students’ lives for years to come. We teachers are precious and each one of us is a gift to our society. We are much needed in this world, and it is my ardent hope that Stepping Stones framework will help you relax into your career and remain in the classroom for a very long time, making a difference in our world, inspiring and supporting our precious students, and finding happiness, ease, and balance in your life.

Implementing the Stepping Stones framework can help you guide your students up the proficiency scales on the students’ own emotional and intellectual timeline. The strategies outlined in this book are designed to build community, include everyone in the classroom, foster success for all students, and develop creativity and a group esprit de corps in a relaxed, easygoing workshop-type environment that is focused, workoriented, and driven by students’ interests and ideas.

The Organization of this Book This book is long. It is not designed to be read straight through in its entirety, like a normal book. Part 1, chapters one through six, was designed to be read in this way, all at once. It is an introduction to the instructional program found in Part 2, which comprises the bulk of this book. Part 2 was designed to be read as you move through the year, used as a curricular resource and friendly voice at your side, guiding you step by step, as the year unfolds.

Part 1 - The Foundational Chapters These first chapters are an introduction to your work this year. They provide an overview of comprehensionbased instruction and recommendations on how to prepare for the year ahead.

Chapter Three, Setting up Your Classroom, guides you through setting up your physical environment, with student jobs and student engagement in mind. This classroom setup shifts a considerable amount of power to your students, which is an important component of the classroom management approach offered in this book.

Sharing the responsibility for the daily workings of the classroom builds community and increases student buy-in. This preparation will serve you well this year.

Chapter Four, Classroom Management, outlines ways to guide the class’s attention so that everyone is able to calmly focus on taking in comprehensible messages delivered at a leisurely, unhurried pace, in a safe, easygoing, relaxed environment. It guides you through mental and physical exercises designed to increase your self-confidence and leadership capacity, and also through step-by-step responses to student disruptions and disrespect.

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Chapter Five, Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies, will introduce you to the yearlong structure of Stepping Stones, the Daily Instructional Framework, the specific cycles and phases from Stepping Stones that you will work with in this transitional year, and simple descriptions of the activities in the order in which they are introduced later in the book. The instructional backbone of this book is a daily instructional sequence, called the “Daily Instructional Framework,” that undergirds all the work we do throughout the year, regardless of the particular activity that we choose to deliver the input. It is a powerful sequence of oral input followed by co-creation of a shared writing text, and then reading the text together to provide written input, mixed with oral input, as the class discusses the co-created text.

Chapter Six, Your Gradebook, outlines suggestions on how to set up your gradebook to best foster student motivation and positive self-concepts as language learners, and to align to the Stepping Stones instructional and assessment system.

Part 2 - A Year of Instruction and Assessment When you arrive at Part Two, you are advised to begin using this book as a desk reference, a day-by-day guide to walk you through the three cycles included in this book. There is no need to digest the entirety of these next chapters, which are long and detailed, before the school year starts. The intended use is for you to keep this book open on your desk and use it as a desk reference as you would a lesson plan book. It will be a guide at your side and provide you with step-by-step directions on how to instruct and assess.

It will lead you through three cycles of the Stepping Stones yearlong curricular framework: Description, Narration, and Information. You will work through the instructional sessions, with explanations of the instructional strategies we will use in that cycle, and then you will come to a section on assessment for that cycle. You will find lots of how-to practical advice as well as friendly pep talks, emotional support, and management ideas. Each session contains a mixture of practical step-by-step instructions on the nuts and bolts of teaching, as well as friendly passages that provide a supportive presence in your work this year, as if I could be there with you, coaching you and cheering you on from the sidelines during your work day, every day, all year. How I wish that were the case!

A Note on Beginning This Work During the Term If you are picking this book up in the middle of the year, it is still recommended that you work through the sessions one at a time. They are offered here in a particular sequence for specific reasons. You will simply use the sessions that you are able to get to before the end of the term. You will still benefit greatly from working through the sessions as long as you work with them in the order presented and are able to avoid rushing through them. We must always go narrow and deep with our students. Less is more.

Let This Book Be Your Guide It is my firm belief that the teachers who will benefit most from this book are those who can find it in their hearts to entrust their year to its guidance. If you can commit to taking a sabbatical year from the endless pursuit of shiny new activities, and commit to following the steps outlined in this book, you will most likely gain the most from your work with it.

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My goal is help you relax into the Stepping Stones approach to proficiency-based instruction, to work alongside you all year, as your coach right there on your desk, or in your bag at soccer practice or propped on the steering wheel while you wait in the daycare pick-up line. For many teachers, this represents a real leap of faith. But please know that this work, when pared down to its essence, requires clear thinking, a mind uncluttered by “what ifs”, and a heart ready to connect with your students day after day. That is why I ask you, in utter humility and friendship, to give me a year of your time and why I strongly urge you to give up mixing in new stuff from elsewhere.

Of course, you can always choose to use this book as just another storehouse of strategies. You can continue to use the “grab bag” approach to CI. You can certainly keep on reading all the blogs and looking everywhere for something new. It is your choice and, understandably, many teachers might not want to jump ship into the Stepping Stones boat and set sail to unknown vistas.

There are indeed a lot of good strategies in this book that could be used alone. But my mission is not just to add some strategies to your “to-try” list. My intention and deep desire is to help you transform your relationship with language teaching. That is a very tall order and what I have seen from teachers who have used the first edition of this book is that it will only be accomplished if you rid yourself of the “cafeteria-style” or “grab bag” approach to teaching: a little of this, a bit of that, and a smidge of the other. That statement is the heart and soul of this book.

Allow it to lead you through a time-tested sequence of instruction and assessment that will, if followed faithfully, give you all you need for the year’s planning. Give yourself the gift of a sabbatical from the hamster wheel, from all the hunting and searching and cobbling together.

Retooling your language program from a traditional grammar-oriented approach to a proficiency-oriented, communicative approach is a big step. On the other hand, taming a communicative language program that you have built over the years from ideas and strategies you found in the Great Grab Bag of the Internet is also a huge undertaking. I’m not going to lie and tell you that it will be an instantaneous process, or that there will not be some cognitive dissonance or discomfort along the way, as you rethink, rearrange, reorganize, and, above all, prune and cut those strategies and materials and tools that are not serving the goal of language acquisition, or are not derived from/aligned to the standards and Can-Do Statements. It’s work. But, it is work that leads somewhere.

No matter what approach you use, or what collection of strategies you develop, there’s going to be some work involved with bringing your language programs in line with the standards and the recommendations derived from research on Second Language Acquisition and how our brains acquire language. But what I want for you is for the work to become as easy as possible as fast as possible. I want you to feel as confident as possible, as soon as possible. I want you to work as little as possible, and soon. That’s why I feel so committed that you need to invest your time in following the recommendations in this book.

Through doing, going through the instructional and assessment strategies in this book, you will develop a “bones-deep” sense of what Stepping Stones is all about. Here, you will read a brief overview of the Stepping Stones framework, but it is truly by working through the instructional sessions that you will come to know, in a Page 19

deep and “forever” kind of way, what makes this approach “work” and why it is proving to be such a gamechanger for individual teachers and departments.

See the graphs below for a visual representation of the general amount of effort required over the long term when learning a curricular framework like Stepping Stones versus learning a bunch of disconnected, yet fun, strategies with no overarching way to make it all make sense.

The Learning Curve with the “Grab Bag” Approach

The Learning Curve with a Curricular Framework

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Please take note of how both the “grab bag” approach as well as the “framework” approach have a steep curve at the beginning. But please pay special attention to how the effort invested in the “framework” approach goes down and STAYS down, while the teacher who invested the same amount of initial energy and enthusiasm in the “grab bag” approach is still working hard, much later, when the “framework” teacher is feeling much more solid and working much less.

Also, please note that when the “framework” teacher is ready to train others or introduce their colleagues to this approach, their task is much easier, because they themselves are operating from a system that they can simply teach to others, instead of being in the all-too-common situation of being just as confused as ever about the overall structure of everything, and trying to somehow impart that to their colleagues. Especially in the case when working to share with colleagues who really do want it all laid out for them (like the textbook does), we often find that the “grab bag” approach makes them want to literally grab their bag…and head for the hills, clutching their trusty textbook and workbook, because they can’t imagine jumping ship into the “grab bag” of “whatever idea I happen to want to try next.”

It’s a Solid Investment in the Rest of Your Career If you are ready to make that investment of time, and go all-in to learn a framework that can guide you for the rest of your career, no mater what level, what language, what content you need or want to teach, then you are in the right place. If you are tired of the hamster wheel of bunches and bunches of shiny, fun, yet disconnected ideas, then welcome home, weary fellow-traveler.

Rest yourself here in this book with me this year. It is designed to hold your hand through the year. Simply leave this book open to the current session, and use it as your guide through the year. If you do this, you will cut down your time spent searching for new strategies, and be able to relax and recharge after school. You will know what stress-free teaching is, and what quick, sure planning can look and feel like. You will also know what it means to have engaged students who exhibit a real desire to be in your class, and you will become more rested and settled, so that you can enjoy these engaged, eager learners each day in class.

The step-by-step coaching program found in these pages is designed for your growth and peace of mind as much as for your students’ success. Self-care and relaxation are the foundation of successful teaching.

Proficiency-based teaching, especially of beginning students, requires more of us emotionally. It requires us to connect, and connect again, and to be with our students, really be with them, day after day. It requires us to be responsive to a child’s energy, to maintain eye contact with face after face, day after day, down through the long arc of the school year, rain or shine, sleet or hail, well-rested or tired, or eyes red and raw from whatever life has thrown your way lately.

Your students deserve a well-rested, calm teacher in front of them in the classroom. As well-rested and calm as possible, given how life can toss us around.

Some might see it as hubris to suggest that you make this book your sole source of ideas and professional development for the year. I see it as a rescue move.

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If you can put your trust in the detailed system this book lays out for you, a product of many years of testing and refining, I predict that you will feel a shift. This year will be an important pivot point for your career and your sense of ease and confidence as a teacher. I predict that you will begin to feel calmer, more centered, more grounded, and less frazzled and confused, and that your calmness will transfer into your students and be observable by anyone who comes into your classroom.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. A whole new approach to the year! How exciting for you!

I take my obligation to our profession very seriously, and to you, my dear reader. Let’s work through this year together, hand in hand, and let’s turn our backs for a time on the mad online dash to find the Next New Thing.

Let’s get you strong and centered, and let’s tend to your skills, one session at a time, not leaving a session until you have mastered it. You will be amazed to see how that process works for you.

I have hammered out the ideas and strategies in each of the instructional sessions in this book with class after class, year after year, focusing my entire career 100% only on proficiency-based teaching. I have been there. And I have picked myself up, feelings bruised, confidence shaken, and I have wrestled this way of teaching into something that actually works for me, brings smiles to my face, and allows me to relax, finally, into teaching.

I know how it is. Perhaps one day we can all meet up and exchange stories and congratulate each other on doing real work, tough work, challenging and emotional and big, important work.

I would be honored to serve as your pilot this year. Fasten your seat belts. Get ready for liftoff. On y va!

Your pal,

Tina Hargaden tina@curriculumclub.com

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Chapter 3: Setting Up Your Classroom The Classroom Walls An almost-blank classroom wall space is advisable at the beginning of the year. This leaves room for what the class will create together. When students walk into a room full of posters and bulletin boards and decor that the teacher has selected, they get the message on an unconscious level that the teacher’s personality is the dominant one in the space. When they walk into a room with almost-blank walls, and plenty of room for them to create, they have room for their own work to take shape.

The visual clutter of walls papered with posters, maps, flags, and the like is distracting. We want to cultivate a sense of simplicity and unhurried calm, and the nearly-blank walls help to soothe us and our students. The reader is asked to trust that, if they follow this approach, their classroom walls will soon take on a feeling of student-driven ownership of the space.

All I have up on the wall in my classroom on day one is a calendar/weather station (discussed below), and my Classroom Rules (provided below) located somewhere where I can easily walk to and touch. I also have spaces designated for a class art gallery, to be added in the future (discussed later in this book). Later, I put each of my classes’ artwork into the gallery, but for now it is simply a blank space with a sign for each period that says “Period One” and “Artists,” but with nothing yet in those spaces, and no student artists’ names, since I have not yet assigned those jobs.

I also have a space on our whiteboard or a poster for listing the names of students who have jobs. Keeping that list current is up to the student “Human Resources Department” (discussed later in this chapter and in the Appendices).

The Rules Poster The Classroom Rules that I use are listed below, but you are encouraged to think about your own wording and specific rules. However, please do not put TOO MANY rules, since they tend to get lost as so much background noise. I have found that three to five rules is sufficient without being overwhelming.

1. Understanding is the number-one goal.

2. One person speaks and the others listen.

3. Support the flow of language.

Please note that Rule One can apply not only to listening in class and understanding the language, but also to the “productive struggle” or “stick-to-it-iveness” in reading and not giving up when an unfamiliar word is encountered. The goal is mutual understanding and respect.

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It is highly recommended that one of your rules, like Rule Two above, basically be a nice version of “Listen and don’t go having side conversations.” It is, by far, the number-one pointed-to rule during instruction. By far. In fact, if understanding were not such a Very Big Deal in comprehension-based, communicative language teaching, then maybe it would be Rule One! I suggest displaying these rules where you can easily point to them, because you will point to them frequently in the first weeks. I also suggest that you write them in the class’s stronger shared language only, for all levels, so that there is absolutely no question in the students’ minds what you are conveying to the class when you point to these rules.

Question Words or No Question Words, That Is the, uh…Question Some teachers like to hang up question word posters in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me) so that they can say the question words in the course language (French or Spanish, for me) and point to the poster where students can read the meaning of the word in English as they hear you say it in the course language. The words are written in English so that students can establish the sound of the words before seeing them written, thus avoiding accent problems later. Other teachers, including myself, establish the meaning of the question words as they would any other word, in the moment that it is needed, by using gestures or sketching/writing on the board. The latter is my recommendation. Our brains encode knowledge more readily when it is “novel,” and writing out the question words in the moment they are needed is more “novel” than pointing to the same old, same old static, “been-there-since-August” question poster or graphic.

After a while, those same old visual aids just fade into the background. Plus, you can get in some extra exposures to the names of the letters in your language, if you write the question words and spell as you write.

Calendar and Weather Station The calendar and weather station figure extensively in the first few lessons of the year, and it is a useful routine to begin class, in any level, with two to four minutes of calendar check-in, because it builds community, settles the class into the Guided Oral Input for the day, and reinforces numbers, months, the date, and weather vocabulary, as well as school activities, sports, and other useful vocabulary.

I have found great success in having two calendars posted. One is a grid that I draw with my classes on a piece of chart paper. When I begin the year, there are no words, not even the name of the month on it, just a grid. I fill in all the lines, words, and numbers as I speak to the class. I can thus spell the words, and teach numbers through 31 in an authentic way, as we move through the month from date to date.

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The second calendar is a pocket chart (these are commercially available for a modest price, a piece of heavy-duty fabric with clear plastic pockets for inserting words to display to the class) on which you can assemble sentences such as: “Today it is __ the __ of __.”

“The weather is ___.”

“In my opinion the weather is__ (good/bad).”

Into the pocket chart, we insert laminated cards with words like “hot” or “cold”. These words are written in such a way as to make the meaning visible, as shown here. For example, the word “cold” is light blue and has a scarf on it and “hot” is red and orange and has a thermometer with flames coming out of it.

Less Really Is More, or Go Simple to Go Big In past years, you may have displayed lots of posters and

decorations in your classroom, like

posters of travel destinations or other pretty yet not essential classroom décor. My strong recommendation is that you take most of them, if not all of them, down, or maybe move them to the hallway bulletin boards.

Limiting the amount of visual information on the walls allows us to use the walls to display personalized, class-created images and information, which is far more important than having things up that the kids can’t relate to. Information that was created by the class is always more interesting and meaningful to the students.

Students more easily retain information that was created with their input, by them, in front of their eyes. It all “sticks” in the brain more easily.

Additionally, when students enter your room in the first days of school and it is a blank canvas ready for them to co-create the environment with you that year, we send them a message by not even saying a word. In effect, we are communicating to them that there is space for them to be co-owners of the “look” of the environment. We show in a concrete way, as we fill the space with our students, that we are serious about inviting their voices and uniqueness into the classroom and curriculum. It is a powerful message, and I hope you will seriously consider redecorating your room by un-decorating it this year.

The Deskless Debate Many proficiency-based teachers have moved to a deskless setup in their classrooms. Students sit on chairs with no desks. For writing time, students use clipboards or perhaps flip around to desks that are lined up along the walls of the classroom. Deskless teachers tend to report that this setup minimizes distractions such as cell phones and fosters community and engagement. However, the goal of communicative language

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teaching is to communicate and whether or not you have desks is not going to make it or break it. I have tried both ways, and honestly, the jury in my mind is still out on this question.

My Classroom Setup Supplies

Finding the money for supplies is always tough. I have had success with Donors Choose, a website where public school teachers can submit projects for funding. I have also had success asking the principal or PTA. Sadly, I have also spent a great deal of my own money on my classrooms. I comfort myself with the fact that if I purchase something, it is mine forever, even if I change schools.

In the summer, I scan secondhand shops and garage sales for furniture. I talk to the custodian, the secretary, and the administration, and sometimes the school can round up the supplies I need. And, if all else fails, I make do. Again, supplies are not going to make or break your language teaching. The quality of your communication skills is the most important aspect. And that is the main purpose of this book.

Here are some classroom setup considerations that I would prioritize, to make that communication more comprehensible and interesting.

Artists’ Work Area: Having class artists is such an incredible boon to a teacher that it is my number-one recommendation for investment in your supplies this year. Student artwork can really take the pressure off of you to be the main source of entertainment and fun.

The artists’ work surface might be a table or (ideally) an easel. You can use any easel, from cheap kiddie easels up through teacher easels with all the bells and whistles that cost hundreds of dollars.

The basic requirements are that the easel needs to be able to hold large pieces of paper, either pads of chart paper or rolls of butcher Page 26

paper. You won’t regret investing in a good quality easel.

Your artists will need a good supply of thick black markers, colored pencils, crayons and colored markers.

Colored pencils and crayons make the best art, and this is no small point in the overall pedagogical approach described in this book. I also provide the artists with white paper, scissors, and tape, so that they can cut white paper to cover up any mistakes, tape it down, and re-draw over it.

Actors’ Stools: I highly suggest stools for your actors. I learned this from Ben Slavic, and it really transformed my relationship with my actors, whom I had previously allowed to wander about the classroom, which often meant that they stole the show, as free-range actors tend to do, being natural hams and entertainers, as the best student actors are.

Sitting the actors on stools keeps them at a good height and “anchors” them so they are less likely to become distractions. What you want is actors sitting above their peers during a story, but below you.

Big Paper: You will need a good supply of large-format paper. Chart paper like the kind you use to make presentations is ideal. However, some chart paper is quite expensive. Amazon sells packs of four 50-sheet pads (200 sheets total) for around $50.00. The brand is TOPS Standard Easel Pads. This paper is not very thick and your artists will need to use a sheet behind the paper as a blotter, but it is the most economical chart paper I have found. Rolls of butcher paper from the school bulletin board cart can also be used, and are perhaps best in terms of value. You will use this paper to make calendars for each class and for the class artists to draw the class’s characters and illustrate their stories for the day.

Your Classroom Library You will, in most cases, not begin free-choice reading until later in the year. With students who have not done independent reading in previous years, you might not begin free-choice reading for several months, but you can begin working on your classroom library now. Below, you will find some ideas for sources of reading material to provision your shelves.

The most personalized and comprehensible, and certainly the least expensive, way to build a class library is to collect the written versions of the stories you create with your students during the Shared Writing portion of the daily lesson framework, explained in detail later in this book. Doing this quickly builds a collection of easy-reading texts that are very familiar, as students wrote them with you. You can include photos of the artists’ work alongside the text to support student comprehension, and/or have your students illustrate the texts.

Towards the end of the year, you can collect all of the stories that you have created Page 27

Kaitlin Leppert with a collection of Write & Discuss.

over the course of the year in one book. It can be a fun project (that also happens to provide a lot of comprehensible input) to have students illustrate the stories for future classes to read.

Another free source of reading material is the texts from the end-of-the-year Story Book Project, described in End of Year Option 3. If you have upper-level classes, they could go ahead and start stocking your library with books to

A book project

prepare for your first-year students’ free choice reading, which tends to begin in December, or January. If you want to enlist your advanced students’ help, you are advised to read the explanation of this project earlier in the term.

Here are some other sources of reading material, some free and some not.

(1) E-Lit App (About $250) Full disclosure. I made this app. But it is, quite honestly, the most visually-scaffolded, compelling reading collection, especially for beginners, that I have ever seen. It is comprised of the types of leveled texts I wish had existed when I was teaching Reading Intervention. In my intervention classes, many of my students who needed reading material that was three to five grade levels below their chronological ages were bored stiff by the “baby books” that I could find for them. This app was a long time coming, and it is the fruit of many, many reading conferences with students who just cannot ever seem to find a text they like, because they have experienced such limited success with reading so far in their schooling. Supporting teachers to build a love of reading is the purpose in setting up this app. It’s been a lot of work, but when I hear back from students who are enjoying the texts, it’s worth it.

(2) Reading A to Z (About $120) This is a subscription that allows you to print short leveled readers (in French and Spanish) that go from A to Z. At first, I use levels A to D and put out higher levels as the year goes on.

(3) Comprehensible Periodicals (Prices vary from FREE to around $50 per term, on Teachers Pay Teachers) Mundo en Tus Manos by Martina Bex or Le Petit Journal Francophone by Cécile Lainé offer subscriptions to digital newsletters on current events, written for language learners. Martina Bex also produces a free literary magazine of student writing, Revista Literal, which you can print from her website.

(4) Class-Created Comics (Free) Making comics from previous stories and discussions is an excellent sub lesson plan, if your guest teacher does not speak your language. See the Appendices for a template.

(5) One-Page Wonders (Free) Jonathan Elliot, aka Profe Elote, has created a database of over 75 short nonfiction articles, in various languages, created by teachers to respond to their students’ interests. You can easily find his blog, by Googling “Profe Elote.”

(6) Scholastic magazines (About $80 for 10 subscriptions) Scholastic magazines are visually appealing and available in German, French, and Spanish. You can build up a nice collection of back issues over the years.

(7) Online Comic Library (Free) Mike Peto has assembled a printable library of student-created comics which you can find on his blog, by Googling his name and “comic library.” This example is by Brett Chonko.

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Assembling a Varied Collection My suggestion for how many texts to include in your collection, to begin free-choice reading, is to have at least three to five titles per student, so that everyone can have a good selection. So, if your largest class is 34 students, you will want at least 34 x 3, or 102 titles. These do not all need to cost you any funds. In fact, by following the suggestions above, you should be able to acquire quite a bit of reading material for the price of printing them and binding them in folders.

You will want to assemble material from the widest variety of sources as possible, about as many topics as possible. You will want a mix of genres: fiction, nonfiction, graphics, current events, poetry, etc. You will also want to offer high, medium, and low reading levels, to differentiate and provide your students with varying levels of challenge. You might also mix in culturally-authentic texts, such as children’s books, infographics, magazine articles, maps, menus, brochures, and other realia.

As you begin to provision your classroom with reading material, you will discover many sources of material created by teacher-authors writing short, leveled texts for language learners. Some are available for free download, and others are available for purchase. Among the growing selection of texts, created by proficiency-oriented language teachers, you are sure to find some titles that will delight and captivate you and your students.

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A Note on Anti-Bias, Anti-Racist Reading The texts that we place on our shelves speak volumes to our students about what we value, and so it is important to be intentional when developing your classroom library, and choose texts that communicate the values you want to uphold and uplift, and eliminate texts that communicate harmful, damaging, or erroneous messages. We want to be sure that our collections represent voices from diverse authors, about diverse characters, and that they portray these cultures, places, and people in a diversity of ways: positive, strong, joyful, committed, uplifting, inspiring, outraged, passionate…and, above all, real and human and true.

For this reason, I urge you to seek out, to the maximum extent possible, authors writing about their own lived experience, and not authors who are imagining how it would be to live a different person’s experience.

It bears special consideration to examine books written by authors about characters and groups whose identities they do not share. You will want to give a close eye to how “outsider authors” portray people and groups whose identities have been (and, in all likelihood, still are) negatively racialized and/or who have been harmed, marginalized, and/or exploited by the dominant culture.

This work is of high importance, as all students - no matter who they are, where they come from, whom they love, or how they identify themselves, benefit from the empathy that reading so readily develops. And, of course, it is absolutely critical that our students whose identities are too often missing or misrepresented in the dominant culture have more encounters with texts that reflect their identities back in a real, true, affirming way.

You are encouraged to check out the “Reading Diversity Lite” Checklist, available for free use and distribution from Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance).

Another excellent resource is the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board, or LLLAB, whose mission, according to Esmeralda Mora, a Founding Director, is to “provide well rounded feedback to help you evaluate possible materials for your classroom library as it pertains to race, ethnicity, cultures, social class, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, religion, family structure, neurodiversity, abilities, and experiences.” The board is composed of a group of diverse members who are well advanced in their fields, and whose personal and Page 30

career backgrounds comprise experiences that enrich their work with a wide array of perspectives. The LLAB can provide you with trustworthy information to help dismantle social inequalities by developing and curating culturally-sustaining reading material. They are committed to (un)learning and welcome feedback and suggestions for honoring and validating everyone’s identities, experiences, and realities.

Setting Up the Classroom to Support Student Jobs The Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, lists student jobs that can support your students in working as “class employees.” I do not pay the students who take on jobs with candy or other commonly accepted forms of classroom currency. This can hinder their internal motivation and can upset the overall well-being of the community. You want the students to take the jobs for the pleasure of their peers’ recognition and for the satisfaction of serving their community. This helps to ensure that you have the right student in the right job - a student who is motivated by the execution of the job’s duties and the desire to serve.

The student jobs can support your instruction with tasks such as creating visual aids and readings, and working in general to assure the smooth functioning of your instruction on a mechanical level. They can also support the day-to-day functioning of your classroom, performing such tasks as passing out pencil and paper for quizzes, welcoming visitors, and monitoring hall passes. They are your classroom support team. Ideally, everyone has some small part to play in the class on either of these job teams. Basically, the more students that are employed in some way to support the class, the better for you.

I strongly suggest that you set up the jobs so that students keep their jobs for the entire year, until they resign or get fired. The Human Resources Department - two responsible, kind student leaders - does the hiring, training, re-training, issuing warnings, firing, and replacing the student employees. I also highly recommend that you do not try to fill positions all at once, but add them as needed, as happens in the business world. If you assign a huge batch of random jobs willy-nilly before the job is needed, and before you know you students well enough to place them in jobs that they are naturally well-suited for, personality-wise, you do not allow time to reflect on which students would best perform at a certain job before filling that position, you will find that later on you wish you had done so.

Every student, no matter what their personality or level of maturity and selfcontrol, is suited for some kind of useful employment that can empower them to hold a valued responsibility for the smooth operation of class. However, in some cases, we cannot see our students’ talents when we first meet them.

Therefore, when we hold off on assigning the jobs, we get into a stance of looking for students’ talents, even if they are hidden under attitudes or behaviors that we might not immediately see as assets. In the Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, you will find detailed job descriptions and training guidelines for each student job. Below are some recommendations for setting up the classroom to support some key jobs.

Student Jobs List Page 31

The Videographer The videographer helps you create a collection of class videos, which can be very useful for sub plans, makeup work for absent students, assessment material, and to create a class Film Festival as an end-of-the-year project/celebration. The videos of class can also be extremely useful for your own development, as you will periodically be asked in this book to review some videos of yourself teaching. I know it is scary; that’s why there is a big old pep talk for you later in the book, to get you excited about watching yourself on video.

For now, just please consider very seriously how useful it is to have a student Videographer, and plan your setup accordingly.

The Videographer’s Seat

To set up the work space, you will need to provide the Videographer with a seat and perhaps a tripod directly in front of your teaching area. It is

important that the videographer be lined up with your line of sight and directly in front of you. You might also choose to hire a shy student for an optional job, the Assistant to the Videographer, a low-stress job that appeals to many shyer kids who want to contribute to class. If so, they will also need a seat in this area.

Actors and “Profe 2” (The “Second Teacher”) As you set up your classroom, you might want to make space for a comfy chair for your “Profe 2” and you will certainly want a prominent place for the two actors’ stools. For me, the two stools are a total non-negotiable piece of classroom equipment. You want stools that are of the height so that the actors will be above their peers but still below your head, if at all possible. This creates a nice line of sight and reinforces the “chain of command,” with you in charge.

I like to position the stools to the side of the room, so that when I move into the part of class when I am using the actors, I can physically move to the side as I call them to the stools. This “freshens up” the lesson by changing the direction in which students are facing, and also sends a nonverbal, physical signal that I am moving from directly instructing the class to being out there “among the people” in the room, moving into more student-led instruction, and sharing the locus of power with the class.

The stools come in handy for other uses, too!

Human Resources Some student workers are not “on stage” like the Artists, Videographer, and Actors. They do not need any special classroom setup as they help with the day-to-day running of your classroom, but their jobs are still essential, in my view, to a well-managed class.

I have found it helpful to first hire a Human Resources Team. Bryce Hedstrom of brycehedstrom.com had the great idea to hire a Human Resources Manager, which inspired me to try it. It made a big difference in how well the classroom jobs function. I suggest an HR team consisting of two students: (1) a Human Resources Page 32

Director and (2) a Training Manager. The HR team has proven invaluable to me, and these students will take on a major leadership role. They will - once they themselves are trained - interview others who are interested in taking a job, deciding who is best qualified. They hire and train the new employees, working with the teacher in this task. If there are concerns about any student’s job performance, they retrain them, issue warnings, and potentially fire them and hire a replacement.

Using students to manage their peers makes class more equitable while preparing them for the realities of life after graduation. I refer to myself as the “CEO” of the classroom, but the day-to-day functioning of the jobs is in students’ hands. Of course, you have to first interview and train the HR Department - the HR director and the training manager. I suggest doing this sometime in the first days of school, in the class’s stronger shared language, which for me is English. The time spent in English will come back to you, with interest, as these students will be invaluable in maintaining a focused class environment in which students can focus on the input, all year long.

What is the process? First, I describe the HR jobs to the class. Refer to the job description provided in the HR Manual, in the Appendices, for those descriptions. Next, I ask interested students to stand, and I formally interview them using questions from the HR manual. It provides all the details you will need to know for these interviews. These are the first interviews of the year. This models for the HR department and the whole class what the hiring process will look like for the rest of the jobs, though, once your HR team is trained to use the manual, it may not be a public process like this one.

I recommend that you print out a list of the HR Manual with its job descriptions and the interview questions for your HR department. I like to have a separate HR Binder for each class, printed out for the HR department to use throughout the year to keep track of who has which job. Later, when you come to an instructional session that requires you to fill a job, you will need only have the HR director use the job description and interview questions to select a student to fill it. I write their name on the class’s Jobs Chart for that class period. This is simply a growing, changing list of students’ names and jobs, which you or the HR department can maintain as jobs are assigned and perhaps re-assigned throughout the year. I then work with the training director to train the new hires using the training points from the manual.

The Concierge A job that can really help support your classroom management is the Concierge. The job is so important that it is worth thinking about here at the very beginning, as you are setting up your classroom. This student ostensibly has the role of escorting anyone who needs support, to go to the office or counseling or wherever.

This is certainly a useful role. But the real reason that hiring your class Concierge is such an important decision is because they will be important in your classroom management, as explained in detail later in the chapter on management. When you need to send the first student to the hall for a private conversation, and that student is reluctant to comply, you will be glad that you chose the right student for this key position, to support their peers if they need help to move into the hall.

You explain it to the students as if the concierge is simply there to help their peers when they are ill or upset, to walk them down the hall. They are there for that, of course, but they are also there to support you when you need to remove a student from your class for a private conversation, and the student is resistant. For that Page 33

reason, it helps if the child chosen for this job be (a) a confident, easygoing person with a certain physical “presence” and (b) kind and (c) respected by their peers.

The concierge thus functions at times like a bouncer who can get their peers to leave the room to wait for you to follow up with them in the hall, without your having to get to the rarely-used classroom management level of calling the office to remove the student. This job is of the highest importance, and that is why it requires a student who is well-liked, positive, supportive, yet firm. The concierge is a great support and ally for you throughout the year.

Because this job is of such importance, you will hire the concierge yourself right away at the beginning of the year. This is done ideally just after you hire your HR department. In the class’s stronger shared language (English for me), describe the concierge job to the class using the job description in the HR Manual. Ask interested students to stand, and help the HR department interview them using the questions from the manual. Then, working with HR, select your concierge.

The Power of Student Jobs Your eventual goal is to employ as many students as possible. There is a long list of possible jobs in the HR Manual. Other common jobs that we assign as needed are: Floor Checker, Birthday Fairy, Paper and Pencil People, Class Secretary, Class Starter, Calendar Helpers, Question Words Kids, Door Knocker/Bell Ringer, Sound Effects Coordinator, Propmaster, Countdown Kid, Class Librarians, etc. You might not use all the jobs in a given class, and that is fine. The jobs outlined above are key, but others are just “nice to have.” Choose the jobs and students that fill them well, and your school year will be much more smooth functioning.

Administrators using checklists for student involvement, routines and procedures, can also fill in your evaluation with a high level of student ownership of the learning environment.

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Chapter 4: Classroom Management Classroom management is foundational to your teaching practice. The word “practice” is intentionally chosen because proficiency-based teaching is, in many ways, like a yoga practice or a meditation/prayer practice. It is more like an exercise in mindfulness and self-control than it is a set of nifty activities or “tricks”. In this chapter you will explore some foundations of this practice. It is strongly suggested that you return to them when needed later during the instructional sessions, which helps you effectively and efficiently move the new ideas presented here into your daily teaching practice.

The Importance of SLOW Slow pacing is the absolute foundation of classroom management. We must mentally prepare ourselves to speak extremely slowly. Way more slowly than we want to. It should be painfully slow to us. It is worth it, in many ways, but especially in classroom management, because students who comfortably comprehend our speech are easier to manage.

It’s ultimately, like so much in managing others, a question of self-esteem. Students’ self-concept is a fragile thing, especially in a new language, which in a way is like building a brand-new identity, and so we want to speak slowly enough that we never lose any of them in a thicket of unintelligible sounds. We want to write or draw on the board, or place our hand or pointer physically upon a visual aid (or the projector screen displaying the visual) to support every utterance, and then walk over and point to the support before we say the word, each and every time we speak, and then take a moment, before we utter another word, to sweep the room with our eyes to check for the “light of comprehension” before moving on to another language chunk, which we will then support by, again, physically indicating the visual support, pausing, and sweeping the room again.

Slow speech is of the utmost importance for student comprehension, and student comprehension is essential for classroom management.

Students who do not understand what is going on in class are more apt to tune out and be disruptive.

However, without a well-managed, attentive, calm class, it is virtually impossible to speak slowly enough to stay comprehensible.

It is a feedback loop: A calm, well-managed class feels patient and this allows us to relax into slow speech, without feeling pressured to go faster. See the images on the next page for a detailed look at how slow “SLOW” is.

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Visual Scaffolding Is Key Responding to students’ need for novelty does not mean re-inventing the wheel each and every day. Rather, it means having a reliable set of concrete, visually-appealing visual scaffolds at our disposal, so that we can select the visual aid that best fits the word(s) we need to support, thus keeping our students’ interest up without having to be a nonstop, energetic performer.

Some of us just aren’t built for the life of the theatre; it’s just not who we are as people. Even teachers who are those “natural performer” types have days, or even weeks or months, when their energy just isn’t up to giving a Daytime Emmy-winning performance in French class six times in a row, with a pounding headache and a restless night of fitful sleep in their gas tanks. Luckily, well-chosen, engaging, clear visual aids can support us when we aren’t feeling the theatricality.

The instructional and assessment materials that we have designed to support the Stepping Stones framework are designed to provide this kind of visual support. You can use them as a springboard for lessons that relieve this pressure to perform and allow you to focus on your skills at speaking slowly and comprehensibly, and placing your hand on the visual. Thus, you can focus on your language delivery while you teach, without the sense of nervousness that often arises from having to create the visual support out of thin air, in the moment, when your attention really needs to be on the students’ eyes, which can indicate so much about their comprehension (which, it bears repeating is the MOST ESSENTIAL foundation of classroom management).

The lesson descriptions will guide and coach you to use or create visual supports such as: - a drawing or image somewhere in the classroom, perhaps created by a student artist - a quick stick figure or sketch that you draw on the board or projector, perhaps with label(s) to provide key words to support what you are saying - words you write when arriving at the board (generally you will write both the course language and also the English translation, or a visual when the class has no shared stronger language) - a chart or visual aid, perhaps from a culturally-authentic source like a magazine or website - a gesture that conveys the word’s meaning, perhaps a little gesture such as pointing to your eyes to indicate the word “looks” or pointing to your face and smiling real big to indicate “happy” and pointing to a big frown on your face to indicate “sad” - a piece of realia such as a piece of paper, a student’s shoe, a red marker, etc.

- a quickly-drawn chart to collect students’ responses to a discussion question (for example, a chart in which you can list various sports/activities (perhaps with a quick sketch to clarify the meaning of the terms) down one side and tally students’ preferences on the other side, e.g. a list of students’ names to record who raised their hand when you asked, “Who loves soccer?” or tally marks (like III or IIII) to count the number of raised hands in response to the question) Visual aids are a way to ensure that students have as many kinds of input as we can possibly provide them so that they understand what we are saying. Many teachers erroneously assume that their students understand the message and continue talking without providing enough processing time or scaffolding students’ comprehension with visual supports.

Visual scaffolding gives kids confidence. And confidence breeds engagement and motivation, which are the bedrocks of an academically-focused, well-managed learning environment.

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Giving the students the processing time that they need, physically placing our hand on a visual aid, or showing a gesture or facial expression, or writing out the words, as shown in the images of me teaching on the page above, make the meaning of your speech concrete, and also has the additional benefit of slowing you down.

As shown in the images from my class, you can “milk” the silences that are generated in the time that it takes you to place your hand upon the visual aid, show the gesture(s), or sketch or write on the board. We can not let the silences make us want to fill them. Each second of silence is a gift to our students, as they process and get comfortable taking in the new language.

Leadership Begins in Our Bodies To manage our class, we must employ leadership that is calm yet assertive. This kind of leadership begins in our bodies. By training our bodies we become more powerful instructional leaders.

When we pause to create or place our hand upon a visual scaffold, we can focus on our breathing. This reduces our cortisol levels and helps the silence not feel awkward to us. The pauses do not feel awkward to our students, who are basking in these silences, savoring the extra processing time.

When our students are able to trust that they will consistently be able to SEE what we are saying as they hear it, they reap the benefits of a significantlylowered affective filter (in other words, their “level of discomfort/unease”), as the new language and information has a chance to go “kathunk” in their minds before we hit their brains with a totally new string of sounds.

When we learn to take time to breathe, we are also giving ourselves a little moment to think, to select the particular strategy that will best scaffold the upcoming word(s) in our next utterance. It keeps us calm.

A simple example is the sentence “She sells sea shells.” Assuming that you are working with a beginning class early in the year, you might scaffold the word “she” by simply walking to the actor and doing a Vanna White move to indicate “she”, in a celebratory kind of way, as if to convey “ta-da, there she is.”

Now the first word is clear to our students, without our having to write on the board. Then, moving on to the verb “sells”, we can pause and breathe and think how to scaffold the meaning of “sells”.

We might choose to walk silently to the board, write “sells” in both languages, and then put our hand on the word in the course language, and then say the word aloud in the course language, pausing afterward to Page 38

the Scanningght ri e th to

class

take a deep, calming breath and scan the room with our eyes to check for engagement and comprehension.

Another option that might present itself to us in the moment of choosing how to represent the word “sells” could be to use a gesture to show the meaning the word.

Scannin to the leftg the class

Or, especially in classes where there is no stronger shared language, we might write the word in the course language and make a quick sketch and/or teach a gesture to establish the meaning, as shown below.

This is the art of teaching.

We have to decide in each moment of instruction which words need visual support and which do not, as well as how to visually represent them for the students. These moments of thinking and selecting help us to slow down the rate of our speech, which is a true gift to our students.

After we say the word “sells” and establish its meaning through whatever means we selected, we then move on to the final chunk of words in the sentence, “sea shells”. Again, we pause, grateful for a chance to breathe and think about how we will scaffold the next sounds that come out of our mouths. We might choose to sketch a seashell on the board and point to it.

We might choose to write L1 and L2 on the board. We might have a drawing of a seashell that our class artists made, that we can point to. We might have known in advance that seashells would be important in this lesson and have brought in a real-life seashell (also called “realia”) which we can use as a visual support. the Scanningthe right class to

In this moment of silence, as we are preparing or displaying the visual support, we breathe and then say the word “sea shells,” and then pause and take another nice deep breath to see how the new words and information “landed” in our students’ minds, by checking in with their Scann class toing the the left

eyes, which are truly windows into their minds.

As the year goes on, our students grow stronger and stronger and we see that our classes need less and less visual scaffolding with each passing month. At some point, our students - to their great surprise and delight - move with us into an exponentially different place of

understanding the language, and we can begin speaking in much longer strings of words.

It truly is an amazing thing when this happens. However, without the foundation of months and months of slow and comprehensible instruction, our students will never reach this point. In fact, many students will check out

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completely if they feel a sense of overwhelm because we have not disciplined ourselves to speak slowly and use copious visual supports.

Exercises for Increasing Your Personal Power Much of leading children happens in the nonverbal realm of body language and self-talk.

Leadership is like an “aura” that is conveyed by our slow, calm, controlled movements, mindful breathing, and mental state that we project through our “energy.” In order to cultivate the calm, centered energy that allows you to breathe, pause, and move with calm intention to smoothly and precisely place your hand on the visual aid that you have selected or created to support your students’ comprehension, you need to lead with your energy, with your personal power.

In the next section you will find some practical exercises that you can start to work on prior to the start of the school year to develop your self-talk and confidence, so that you can more easily project this “energy” as you teach.

The exercises outlined below can assist you in responding calmly to students when they do not comply with your expectations. They will help you maintain the ability of other students to focus as well as your own ability to provide calm, slow language for the class. They will help you maintain your calm in the face of stressors.

Calm, confident leadership is the key to classroom management. And our mindset and sense of confidence and personal power are the foundations of this calm leadership.

It is strongly recommended that you begin working with these exercises as soon as possible, ideally before the start of the next school year, to develop your personal power and self-esteem as a leader for your students.

You might want to set a series of reminders on your phone, or leave post-it notes around your home or work space, so that you remember to make these practices a habit, ideally a daily habit. It is especially valuable to begin these practices before the start of the school year, so that you have time to strengthen your teaching persona, like sending your teacher self to the gym to grow stronger muscles before the big event -- the first day of school.

Power Posing You can begin to rewire your brain to send positive messages about yourself as a leader. One way to do that is to take two to five minutes periodically throughout the day to assume a “power pose”. This practice, popularized through a TED Talk by Amy Cuddy, is a way to trick your brain into manufacturing more “leadership chemicals” and increasing your feelings of personal power.

Simply find a place where you can have some privacy, and get into a posture that takes up a lot of space. Plant your feet far apart on the floor, puff out your chest in a proud stance, and raise your hands wide above your Page 40

head or plant them confidently on your hips, elbows spread wide. Take a few deep breaths in this posture, and then hold it for a few minutes. This posture has been shown to increase achievement and confidence, and is a practice that chimpanzees also perform. Cuddy says, “Our bodies change our minds.” This posture, performed regularly, will rewire your brain.

Cultivating Positive Self-Talk Another practice you can start right now is to begin retraining your brain for positive self-talk. By repeating positive statements about ourselves, we lay down new neural pathways that eventually make it easier for our brains to think such valuable and empowering thoughts on their own accord. This can transform our self-talk to support our leadership and self-confidence.

Try repeating one or two of the statements below 50 to 200 times per day, or even more. The more, the better! Saying these statements silently to yourself is fine, but it is best to say them aloud. The more confidently and assertively you can say them, the more effect they will take. Say them like they are already true, and allow yourself to feel the positive emotions that you would feel if they were true, and they will take effect faster. Combining your emotions with words, over and over, is a powerful way to teach yourself new habits. This is something that is sorely needed in our beleaguered profession these days, where the morale of the entire teaching corps in America is at an all-time low.

You might not feel that you agree with these statements when you begin saying them. You might feel silly.

That is a sign that you need to repeat them all the more. Go ahead, try a few positive statements for a few weeks. What do you have to lose?

1. My energy effortlessly and easily leads my class.

2. I am calm and centered in my classroom.

3. I am a natural leader. When I speak, people listen.

4. I take a deep breath before I speak or react.

5. When I teach, I feel calm, happy, and supported.

6. I am a strong leader whom my students trust to guide them.

7. Asserting my leadership is an opportunity for me to grow. I’m happy when I have a chance to be strong for my students.

8. I am respected and happy and centered in my teaching.

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In addition to these general words of affirmation, practice your self-talk for when you will be stopping instruction to indicate to the class the rule that was broken. You can practice these steps so that they become second nature to you and are available to deploy, without too much mental dithering, whenever your instruction is interrupted, even by the smallest whisper.

1. Visualize that you are instructing the class and a small disruption happens. Perhaps a student has turned away from the class discussion or has begun whispering to a neighbor, or is fooling around with their pencil case, or is up out of their seat without permission. Notice that. Allow yourself to feel a small jolt of that “I’ve been disrespected” feeling, that tiny moment of slight unease or even a little feeling of panic.

Picture yourself teaching and noticing a little disruption. It is important to be on the lookout for even minor disruptions. If you instantly respond to the minor ones, the major ones will be much, much less numerous. You might want to repeat the following positive statement to yourself a few times, summoning a happy, proud feeling as you do so: “When I notice small disruptions, I minimize the big ones.”

2. Take a deep, calming, centering breath, a really big one that feels cleansing. The purpose is to release stress and help yourself to get out of the fight-or-flight response that is natural to feel when conflict arises. As you breathe, say to yourself, “I am able to show the class how strong I am” or perhaps, “Thank you for this opportunity to develop my leadership.”

3. Practice walking very slowly and calmly, as if you are in no hurry at all, over to the classroom rules poster. Put your hand under the rule (usually #1 or #2) that the student(s) just broke.

4. Take another deep, calming, centering breath, a really big one that feels cleansing. As you breathe, say to yourself again, “I am happy that I am able to show the class how strong I am” or perhaps, “Thank you for this opportunity to develop my leadership.”

5. Practice sweeping the room with your eyes, in an inclusive, neutral way, not focusing on the students who disrupted, and forcing yourself to have a smile in your eyes, and a small smile lifting the corners of your mouth. This might be fake. It is OK. Our bodies do not know a fake smile from a real one. Faking smiling releases feel-good chemicals and calms us when we need it most.

6. After sweeping the room, picture yourself giving a friendly little wink, nod, or extra smile to the disruptive students.

7. Visualize yourself going right back to your instruction, as if nothing had happened.

8. Visualize saying just ONE more sentence, noticing another minor infraction, and repeating the process over again. Do this a few times and you’ll see why all the positive self-talk and calming breaths are needed. Sometimes I like to say to myself, as I point to the rules for the thirtyeighth time that hour and breathe, “I’m grateful I get paid to take deep breaths.”

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The “Queen Victoria” Posture You can also begin practicing your “Queen Victoria Stare.” This is what Dr. Fred Jones, a well-known and beloved classroom management expert, calls the posture we need to assume when confronting an individual student about their behavior.

This is a step above the “point to the rules” routine you practiced above, and its use and importance will be explained more later in this chapter. Using the Queen Victoria Stare is a powerful, silent, “don’t-mess-with-me” and “getwith-the-program” message to students, and it is one of the most important tools we have in developing our personal power as teachers.

Like so many worthy goals in teaching, and in life, we can’t be afraid to do it simply because it makes us uncomfortable.

Public Domain, 82 Alexander Bassano, x.php?curid=66404 ikimedia.org/w/inde https://commons.w

Here are the steps to practice:

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. In a classroom setting, they will be facing the student whom you are disciplining.

2. Turn your torso to face in the direction of your feet.

3. Relax your shoulders, arms by your side. Do not put hands on hips or cross them in front of you, as those are confrontational postures.

4. Take a deep, calming, centering breath, in and out through your nose, deep into your lungs.

5. Relax your jaw, consciously releasing any tension there.

6. Take another deep, calming, centering breath, in and out through your nose, deep into your lungs.

7. Put the expression on your face of “I have seen this a million times and it has never worked, and it is going to stop now.” This is not a confrontational look, but rather a withering look of extreme boredom and confidence that you will reign supreme in your classroom. See the picture of the Queen Herself if you need a role model.

8. Think to yourself (you might want to repeat this to yourself as an affirmation ten to twenty times as you hold this posture), “When confronted by disrespect, I breathe and respond with calm silence.”

9. Visualize yourself holding this calm posture, facing the student silently, until they stop saying “What did I do?” or “What?” or “What are you looking at?” or any of the other possible responses a rude child might offer you. Visualize yourself waiting until they are following your rules, telling yourself that you will follow up with them later in private, and then resuming your instruction, as if nothing had happened.

The above skills might feel silly to practice. Practice them anyway. Practicing them moves them into muscle memory in the moments they are needed. If you have not taken the time to move them into muscle memory, they will not be available to you when you need them.

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The moments when we most need to access these skills are the times when we are least likely to have the mental energy to ponder our next move. Practice these skills now, own them, teach them to your body, and you will thank yourself later in the all-too-frequent emotionally charged moments of responding to challenging behavior.

Nuts and Bolts of Classroom Management Strong messages about our leadership must happen from the very first minute of the first day of class and be embedded in our instruction to the point where ensuring compliance with the Classroom Rules - described in this section - takes precedence over all other concerns.

As we engage our students in Small Talk (aka Calendar Talk) and Card Talk (or Slide Talk), two common beginning-of-the-year activities, we constantly refer to the Classroom Rules. Thus, we constantly train our students in what is required of them in a proficiency-based classroom, not by telling them what we want but by showing them.

It is strongly suggested that you do not provide students with a long discussion of the Classroom Rules on the first day of class. Students zone out, especially on the first day, when presented with yet another list of Do’s and Don’t’s. It is generally best to just begin teaching and use the rules whenever they are needed.

When little disruptions happen, as they inevitably will, simply walk to the rules and place your hand under the rule that has just been violated, and wait in silence, sweeping the room with your eyes, without saying a single thing. Not even a sigh of exasperation, not even a “Johnny!” to call a wandering student’s attention to the rules. Just standing, with your hand firmly planted under the rule, breathing calmly and deeply, and displaying your best Queen Victoria stare.

Without displaying impatience or worry, even if you are feeling them inside, simply wait for students to get curious about why you have stopped instruction, cast their eyes about, and take note of the rule that you are calmly and silently indicating to them with your hand. See the images below for a detailed explanation of how I talk myself through a trip over to the good ole Rules Poster.

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It is of the utmost importance that you are mentally prepared to execute this series of moves as many times as you need, whenever the smallest disruption occurs, even if you only manage to say two full sentences in an entire class period. You will, if you execute this “walking to the rules” move each and every time you feel students’ attention waning, build a strong foundation for the class’s success this year.

The Importance of the First Days of Class The first few days and weeks of the new term are a special time, a golden time, and your best shot at cultivating a classroom environment that is conducive to deep, focused listening and comprehension. We don’t get any “do-overs” after the first week of school has gone by. We either establish clear leadership and expectations in those first lessons or, as too many of us have sadly experienced, we will struggle the rest of the term to keep students focused on the discussion and language input.

Thus, as you are engaging in Small Talk and Card Talk, or other activities, just know that the activity itself is not actually the main focus of your instruction. Rather, your main objective is to reinforce the Classroom Rules at every turn, perhaps up to fifty times per class period during those first days.

This sends a powerful message. While certain students in the first days of school are quietly watching their teachers for signs of weakness that they will exploit in the months ahead - and there are kids who do that - we send them the powerful message that in our classes they won’t be doing that.

Classroom management is important in every classroom, but especially in a proficiency-based class because so much of the time is spent in community conversations, and students need to exert a good deal of selfcontrol to keep the discussion on track, particularly when it is conducted in a new language.

Below, you will read a more detailed explanation of a multi-tiered classroom management system to support students in being productive members of the class community. Pointing to the rules over and over until they “stick” in the class’s minds is the first line of defense, or “Plan A.”

There are always students who will test even the most consistent teacher. So, simply standing by the rules will not be enough for all students. If you succeed at disciplining yourself to consistently, with unerring predictability, use “Plan A” each and every blessed time there is a disruption in the Force, you lay the foundation for the whole class to understand the expectations in a concrete and visceral, real way.

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Further, if you point to the rules in the calm, silent, and - let’s face it - boring and rather annoying way described above, you remove a good deal of the “payoff” for testing the teacher and the rules. Many students seem to enjoy playing the fun (for students, not for us) game of “Poke the Bear,” the bear being you, the teacher. They take perverse delight in seeing teachers lose their cool, turn red, yell, and become an amusing spectacle. If you train yourself to point to the rules in this very neutral, dispassionate, and calming manner, you have removed this payoff, and many disruptive students will get the message that it is more annoying than amusing to see you react to their hijinks and shenanigans.

You further remove the payoff by being devastatingly, boringly, annoyingly consistent in deploying “Plan A” because you clearly demonstrate, over and over, that is no chance that you will ever react in a novel, fun, or amusing manner. It is extremely important that you train yourself to interrupt the instruction and redirect the class in the light and non-confrontational way described above, each and every time the class’s behavior does Boring is the goal.

not meet the class expectations.

If you do this, your students will soon come to expect that infractions of the rules result in this rather boring and certainly not entertaining routine. Gradually, students’ motivation to play a nice round of “Poke the Bear” in your class will wane. They can save up their “Poke the Bear” aspirations for science class, or Language Arts. Not German class. Not YOUR class, the most important class of the day.

Plan A, walking to the rules and waiting silently, is the go-to. But you will most likely need a backup plan for those students who need to test your leadership, even as the majority of the class develops the ability to follow expectations. For supporting those students, it will be extremely valuable to have your backup plans all lined up and ready to go when you need them in the moment of confrontation or disrespect.

In the actual moment when these students are testing your leadership, you will probably feel stressed, unsure, or even awkward or embarrassed. So you will be very well-served by memorizing and practicing these backup plans until you can deploy them without having to think about your next move. The prepared and confident feeling you will have cannot be overestimated. It allows you to maintain that “aura” of calm, assertive, confident leadership, even in challenging moments when you feel nervous, angry, frustrated, exasperated, upset, confused, or intimidated (or any of the other myriad emotions that we feel when students do what they are programmed to do: vie with us to determine the limits of socially-condoned behavior in a given context).

These “backup plans” are a series of memorized steps that dial down on disruptive students with increasing strength and power. They support us in taking our classroom management to the next level when needed. If

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Plan A does not work with a particular student, we move on to Plan B. Plan A generally reaches the majority of students.

If your entire class is violating a rule, such as in the case of a chatty group who simply don’t have the selfcontrol to not bust into side conversations during instruction, you should stick with Plan A, even if you deploy it 52 times in a 54-minute class period. You want to use Plan A until you get to the point where the class as a whole self-monitors and you start to hear students “shushing” or redirecting each other when you begin to walk over to the rules for the umpteen thousandth time that day.

If the class as a whole has internalized the rules, and yet some students continue to test you, they need you to move on to Plan B and C, or D, or even E (as outlined below). If you have prepared, practiced, and memorized these more “personalized” backup plans, you will feel calmer and more confident that you will be able to work with these students to bring them on board with the rest of their peers.

Responding to Disruptions When They Happen in the Moment The steps below outline a powerful series of escalating responses to disruptions. They are deployed mechanically. It is best to memorize them so that they are there for you when you need them, so that you do not have to think in the moment about what you will do or say next. This keeps your emotions out of it. If one step fails to stop the problem behavior, you can mechanically go to the next level of response.

Each step on the pages below represents an increasingly assertive, powerful, instantaneous response to those in-the-moment transgressions that plague most teachers all year. You can greatly enhance the probability that YOU will not be one of those plague-besotten teachers by getting these classroom management tools solidly in your repertoire.

Plan A is the foundation. It is the first step in establishing yourself as a calm, assertive, no-nonsense leader in the group. It shows your class that you will respond - you will act - each and every time a student breaks one of your classroom rules. But you will not act from emotion. You will never lose your cool, internally or externally. You will act without much fanfare at all.

You will use body language, calmness, silence, and patience to establish your leadership. You will use your Classroom Rules poster to do the talking for you. You will simply notice each and every infraction of the rules, and then in a dispassionate way immediately stop all instruction, and calmly, slowly, and silently walk over to the rules poster, and without speaking, point to the rule that is being broken and regally smile at the class in an unflappable, almost bored way, à la Queen Victoria.

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The Classroom Rules 1. Understanding is the number-one goal.

2. One person speaks and the others listen.

3. Support the flow of language.

The Classroom Rules work best when they are prominently displayed so that you can easily walk over to them, and put your hand on them, and comfortably wait with a calm demeanor, without speaking, until they comply with the rule. Thus, it is important to place the rules in a location where you can comfortably stand by them with your hand under the rule you want to enforce, without having to contort yourself into an undignified posture as you wait. It is rather difficult to embody Queen Victoria when one is straining to reach the rule to which one is pointing.

The rule that teachers point to most frequently is Rule #2 - “One person speaks and the others listen”. Do not speak. Rather, you will simply indicate with your body language and your calm, patient, regal little smile that you expect them to correct their behavior. This subtle smile lightens the mood even as you display your strength by unflinchingly addressing every single tiny little problem behavior.

Often, as we wait for compliance, we hear students shushing each other. We might hear things that are a little bit hurtful to us, such as, “Is she gonna stand there all day?” or “There she goes again.” We must not allow our feelings to get the better of us in moments like this, because we are committed to experiencing the great power of running a classroom full of youngsters in a dispassionate, calm way. These remarks from the sassy kids are actually a positive sign. They show that the more rude and outspoken students are ready to be schooled by us. If a student makes a comment by which they intend to undermine our authority (“Doesn’t she have anything better to do than stand there and stare?”), we stay in the moment.

This is actually a dramatic confrontation. Students are testing our leadership, to see if we can be trusted, and to see how amusing it might be to see us respond to their misbehavior. So, we focus on maintaining our composure. We stay the course, continuing to breathe deeply and calmly and to Queen Victoria it up. It helps to tell ourselves that, yes, in fact, we do not have anything better to do than stand there. Or that, yes, there we do go again. It helps to tell ourselves, “This student is articulating my classroom management plan for their peers.”

Those moments of challenging by those few kids are so valuable to us! They reveal the child for what they are - a person who could ruin our entire class for the entire year. So by staying in the moment and not caving, we win the class over to us, to what we want done. Of course, such comments can cross the line into blatant disrespect, for instance, if a child were to refer to us in profane terms or call us a fool, etc. Of course, in that case we immediately move on to the more aggressive plans outlined below.

Let’s be clear about what is happening here. What is going on when students make such comments out loud or even under their breath is of colossal importance. Failure to respond calmly and dispassionately means that all the work we have ever done in learning to teach for proficiency will be for naught.

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When you hear comments like, “You all know she’s just going to keep on standing there!” then you know that the more vocal, outspoken students are beginning to feel uncomfortable or concerned that they may be in a class with a teacher who will actually stop them from taking over the classroom. This is your goal, so I strongly urge you to take a deep breath and simply wait it out.

Unless the comments cross the line into profanity or violence or other serious violations of school norms, I simply wait for 100% of the class to comply with the rule, patiently, with good humor, and knowing deep down that an adult is in charge of the classroom. What if I must wait for 30 seconds that feel like an eternity? I do it anyway until we get compliance. Waiting out those 30 seconds could bring my students scores of hours of calm focused listening throughout the rest of the year. On some level, deep down, even the most challenging student will thank you for finally teaching them how to behave in school.

This is a very critical juncture in your relationship with this class. You do not want there to be any entertainment value in breaking the rules. In fact, you want your response to be so automatic that it is identical each time you use it. Even if you are pointing to the rules for the forty-eighth time that day, you want to execute the same calm walk, the same point, the same regal smile, the same calm wait, the same sequence of gestures that you did on your first trip over to the rules.

Watching a teacher lose their cool is a national pastime for students. We must remain cool, every time, so that the entertainment value of watching us discipline the class, the adolescent glee in seeing their teacher lose it, that bedevils so many teachers, is removed from our classrooms.

We thus make listening to the actual instruction more entertaining than breaking the rules. And since our instruction is all about the kids and their ideas, or interesting topics, why shouldn’t our instruction win?

Especially when the alternative is to see the same exact, calm, same-old same-old response that they always see, the boringest teacher in the land calmly pointing to the same old boring class rules.

“Ho-hum” is the goal here. “What a snooze!” is the thought we want our students to have.

Establishing the rules in this way builds your personal power in the classroom. It establishes you as the calm, in-charge alpha energy in the room. This energy is ancient, even present in troops of chimpanzees.

However, histrionics, exasperated emotional reactions and explanations undermine this energy. So when we simply stroll over to the rules in a calm way, pointing them out to the class with simple body language, waiting for compliance, we build and maintain our alpha status in the group.

The main objective in the first couple of weeks is to use very simple, engaging, personalized activities, and above all SLOW and thus easily understood speech, to train the students in the classroom rules. You will spend a good amount of time over at the rules poster, in the first month. It is a blue-chip investment in your future as a proficiency teacher this year! You might want to install a little shelf for your coffee so you make your time over there at the rules poster more enjoyable...for you, anyway. Not the poor, bored kids.

You will know that you are doing this right when the students begin to tire of your constant, calm, goodnatured smiling, of your steady and silent reinforcement of the rules, and resort to shushing each other when they see you saunter over to the Classroom Rules poster.

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You will know that you have built the proper atmosphere in your class when you sense that: 1.your instruction has become slow and effortless, 2.your speech is calm and unhurried, as if you have all the time in the world to speak to your class, 3.your class waits silently and patiently as you frequently clarify your message by writing or walking to a word or visual aid, 4.you are taking time to breathe and think and smile in class, and scan the students’ eyes to check their comprehension and engagement after every new chunk of language, 5.your students demonstrate the desire to wait with you in the few seconds of calm silence that you lovingly insist on after each transgression, and 6.you feel that you are finally teaching in a way that is actually fun and you feel strong and effective!

Such an atmosphere is crucial for authentic communication in the language to thrive in your classroom.

If you are standing, breathing, and regally smiling at the class as a whole, and almost everyone is complying with the rules, but one student is not coming along with the group, you can congratulate yourself that you have laid a strong foundation.

98% of your students have learned to trust your leadership. It might have taken 4,567 trips over to the poster over the course of six class sessions, but saints be praised, your class is finally getting it.

Pat yourself on the back. Your unerring devotion to deploying Plan A has revealed hidden treasure: those several students who need more personalized support. Working through the subsequent steps with those students will strengthen your confidence as a teacher, help those students develop important self-regulation skills, and also demonstrate your warm, caring, no-nonsense approach to helping them join the herd and be a productive member of the class.

Perhaps most importantly, these steps are designed to bond you to these students, by demonstrating your consistency and trustworthiness and also helping the student to maintain their sense of personal autonomy and social standing.

Once we are feeling confident that the class as an overall group has responded to Plan A, yet we notice that one student persists in disruptive behavior, even as their peers have settled back down and are ready to proceed, then we go immediately to Plan B with the outlier.

You will move physically closer to the student who is at ground zero of the disruptions. Dr. Fred Jones, the great classroom management trainer, and the author of the must-read book on classroom management, Tools for Teaching, suggests a specific sequence of movements and actions that use our body language and physical presence to establish our leadership and set firm limits with our students, without spiraling into those Page 52

“But I wasn’t doing anything!” or “You’re picking on me!” arguments that end up with someone (usually the teacher) losing face.

Please note that Plan B is for correcting the behavior of students who exhibit garden-variety patterns of misdeeds. It is not designed for students exhibiting seriously dangerous behavior. These suggestions are provided for dealing with commonly overlooked (except in your classroom) behaviors such as side conversations, using a cell phone, talking back, interrupting, calling out, laughing at inappropriate times, making weird random noises, tapping pencils or coins, excessive pencil sharpening, congregating by the trash can, launching projectiles, poking neighbors, general clowning, etc.

The most important aspect of Plan B is silence. Silence is strength. Fred Jones says, “Open your mouth and slit your throat.” This means that when dealing with behavior management, talking is the enemy. You do not want to talk to the student about their behavior; you want the behavior to change. That is the only “win.” The more we speak, the more we diminish our personal power. Therefore, body language, silence, and patience are our best allies in our work with challenging students.

When we have a student (or a group) who reveal themselves as needing some personalized attention to come into alignment with our expectations, and we have found ourselves pointing at the rules several times, just for them, this is when we use Plan B. When we direct our assertive, calm leadership more directly at them, using only our body language to silently redirect them, we are using Plan B correctly.

You will use the Queen Victoria Stare, a stare that says, “Oh you poor fool, I have seen this kind of nonsense before and I will stop it just as I have a thousand times before.”

Even if it is your first week of teaching, you can fake this stare.

Soon, you will not have to fake it. You will own it.

You will most likely move to Plan B from your perch at the rules poster, as you are implementing Plan A. Generally, the situation is that the class, overall, has corrected their behavior, and yet one student persists in some kind of disruption.

At this point, everyone expects you to just keep standing there pointing to the rules. This “stand, point, and patiently wait” rigamarole has most likely become “old hat” to the class by now.

However, since the rest of the class is on board, and you have now identified an outlier who seems impervious to Plan A, you will instead turn your feet to face the student who continues to disrupt. You will plant your feet both facing in the direction of the student. You are still silent; you have not said a word, or even signed in an exasperated manner, or called the student’s name.

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Without a sound you will plant your feet facing the student, and then turn your entire body in their direction, still silently. Keep your arms down; do not point at the student. Do not say anything. Do not call their name.

Do not say, “Shhh.” Say nothing.

Turn your entire torso and shoulders in the direction that your feet are facing, so that it is abundantly clear that you are stopping instruction to address the distraction. If the student does not notice your attention is directed at them, because they are so deeply distracted, enjoying themselves, simply wait silently until they notice.

Remember, opening your mouth is your last resort. You do not want to invite a conversation. You want to see a different behavior, not have a talk with the student. There is no need to discuss this with a fifteen-year-old.

If you cave and allow the student to engage you in a verbal interchange in this moment, you may as well do a happy dance out of the classroom because you will have lost your class for the rest of the year.

Everyone knows the rules by now. You have pointed to them about thirty-five thousand times in the three days of school that have elapsed so far. Now simply wait until the disruptive student notices the energy directed at them. They will notice. 95% of classroom management is energetic and happens in the realm of body language and nonverbal communication. They will sense that you and the class are focused on them. They will eventually look up. It only feels like it took six minutes. In reality, it was probably eighteen seconds.

Once they have noticed you and are looking at you, take a few slow steps in the direction of the disruptive student. Do not get overly close, though. And do not assume a combative posture. Keep your arms at your sides, not on your hips or crossed in front of you. Relax at the shoulders. Relax your jaw. Take a moment to take some deep, calming, centering breaths. Think to yourself, “I am fortunate that I have the tools to exert calm leadership, and I have worked too hard to get to this position professionally to let some rude child ruin it for everyone.”

In moments like this, it can help your outlook if you think, “I’m lucky I’m getting paid to breathe and relax.” You need to keep yourself in a positive frame of mind, and not allow your reptilian brain, your fight-or-flight system, to take over. Deep breaths work wonders to drop you into a calm, centered emotional space.

Do not say a word. Simply make it clear that you are looking at them, so that they - and their peers - know without a doubt that you are dealing with them. Stare at them with a patient, withering, “Been There, Done That” stare. Do not say a word. Breathe. If they say something, perhaps, “What?” or “What’d I do?” then simply respond with what Fred Jones calls a look of boredom. It is not very productive for a student to argue with someone who is just staring at them silently, with a calm look of “I have seen this all before” on their face and no desire to win at anything but compliance with the rules.

Once the student is listening, or has put the cell phone away, or has turned to face you, or has done whatever you need them to do to comply with your expectations, simply take another deep breath, ideally without a sound.

Even a “sigh of relief” subtly undermines your leadership, because it reveals that this situation did, in fact, affect you. This is like ringing the starting bell for the “Poke the Bear” championship round, because it shows that the heretofore unflappable leader has, indeed, finally been “flapped.” The current score is: Class: One Bear: Zero Page 54

Displaying emotion opens you up to be an unwilling participant in students’ next round of “Poke the Bear.”

Better to stay absolutely calm. The students can get their jollies in another class. YOU are not going to be the bear this school year.

Simply take a calm, slow, silent breath and turn back to the rest of the class, and, without further remonstrations, smile as if to say, “Well, back to the fun stuff!” and resume instruction, as if nothing had happened.

It is important to note that Plan B is only the next step in a series of increasingly-pointed interventions. So how do we know when to move on to Plan C with a particular student?

If we sense that a student’s behavior is going to require Plan C and beyond, you might want to put that student at the top of our to-do list for the next several days. It is best to call home immediately after school and then in class, make the student the center of attention for a few days. You might talk about their card during Card Talk, pick their idea just to throw them a positive experience of acceptance, or just make time to check in with them in the hall or during transitions in class, to talk about something that is not their behavior.

You might assign them a job, not in a threatening way but rather in a way that allows them to develop a positive role in class. You can try to learn something that the student is good at (perhaps during Card Talk or Small Talk (aka Calendar and Weather), and tell the class about this student’s accomplishments in glowing terms. Of course, some disruptive students do not like being the center of attention, so if the student appears even a bit uncomfortable, then we immediately drop the Make Susie the Center of Attention campaign.

When the class in general continues breaking the rules, we continue using Plan A. But when a particular student continues on breaking the rules, do not use Plan B more than a couple times on that child. Move to Plans C and D. News flash: You will use Plan A all year, every day. It is the default setting. It is your cruise control until June. Are you rethinking the suggestion to install a coffee shelf over by the rules? You will by the end of September.

If you have a student (and, most likely, you do!) whom you have Page 55

already stared at using your best Queen Victoria Stare a couple of times but who seems to always go right back to their old shenanigans, you will need to move on to Plan C with that child. Plan C is a very powerful, structured conversation that I have used for years, since I learned how to talk to kids this way from my Classroom Management professor, Ken Petersen, at Portland State University in 2004. So, if you like this plan as much as I do, just say, “Thank you, Ken!” I know I do.

In this level of intervention, you get in more proximity to the student. It happens this way.

It’s a normal day. You are teaching class. Rocking. Rolling. Like a boss. Wait! You notice a disruption.

Land’s sakes, it’s Student X again! Knock me over and butter my biscuits, who would have guessed? But, you don’t let it get to you, at least not visibly. You just think, “OK I have Plan B’d this kid a couple times.

Onward and upward!”

You will now execute Plan C. You take a deep, calming breath. You turn and face the student, with your feet, then your torso, then your whole body. You take another deep breath, summoning your Withering Stare, aka the Queen Victoria Stare. You first relax your jaw. Fred Jones teaches you to lick the roof of your mouth to force your jaw to relax, which might not just happen automatically in a stressful moment like this. Then, you relax your shoulders, dropping your hands to your side and releasing tension in your hands. Walk over to the student, calmly, without saying a word. Walk closer to them than you did when you executed Plan B. You stand by their desk, silently, and take a final deep, calming, centering breath.

If the student is giving you backtalk, for example, “What’d I do?” you simply respond with a stony silence, waiting with a calm, non-confrontational posture, arms and hands neutral (not clenched or crossed or reaching out, but just down by your sides). And then you simply wait, summoning a look of extreme boredom and disinterest, until they are all talked out.

Then and only then, once they have said their peace and are most likely rather surprised that you are not talking back to their backtalk, get down on one knee by the student. This posture conveys a powerful message to them: “We are on the same team. I am calm and self-assured enough to lower myself to you, in service to you and our class. I have the self-confidence to not lord my status as teacher over you. I do not need to assume a confrontational stance with you. My power comes from within, not from confronting you in public in front of your peers.”

Everyone will probably be looking at you with great interest, but you want the next part of Plan C to be just between you and the student.

After you have knelt by them, quietly say to them, so that it is not a public announcement, “This happened before, and it is happening again now. And if it happens again, we will have a longer conversation, and we won’t be smiling at the end.” And - this is key - smile at the student (even though it may be sort of a forced smile). Nine times out of ten, they will smile back. It is human nature to smile when smiled at.

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Notice that in this short conversation, you do not name the behavior. You say “THIS” happened. This is purposeful. Naming the behavior invites arguing. You do not want arguing. It is clear to all involved that the student has broken a rule. It is also clear to all involved that you have consistently and fairly applied Plan A to everyone every time a rule was broken. Thus, you are clearly not “picking on” anyone, or playing favorites.

The student, in all likelihood, knows what they are doing wrong. There is no need to have a long conversation about it. It is, however, best to follow up this conversation with a phone call home. Perhaps the student has a family that can support them in processing the issues, which will certainly make your job easier. Perhaps they don’t, which is also valuable information going forward, as you will need to rely on other adults in the student’s life (counselors, coaches, other teachers) to help you hold the kid accountable, in true “it takes a village” style.

As with Plan B, you will then get right back to teaching, with no grudges, and with the mental stance that OF COURSE the behavior will change.

Of course, it might not. You could very well see further disruptions from this student. Maybe immediately.

Maybe later in the class period. Maybe later this week. But until then, you’re all in the Clean Slate Club, and bygones will be bygones, as long as the student can hang with the class expectations. Whenever this particular student resumes the disruptive behavior, then you can move on to Plan D. It’s fun!

You have now told the student that you will have a longer conversation if they are again disruptive. So if and when that happens, either that same day or the next day, or again in the future, you need to make good on

that promise, which is what Plan D will equip you to do. I learned most of the “ingredients” in Plan D from the one and only Ken Petersen, including the very powerful phrase “we won’t be smiling at the end.” People ask me often about that phrase. I learned it from Ken and YES, I actually say that to kids. No, I don’t say it to every kid. But to most of them, yes, I do. It “humanizes” the interaction in Plan C, and it is very useful.

Plan D is a longer, yet still memorized and structured, conversation in private. This usually means the hall. It is very heart-wrenching to send a student to the hall. So, this is a juncture where you will want to summon all of your positive self-talk.

However, this is a necessary step in forming a relationship with this student based on trust, communication, and follow-through. Many students who persist in breaking the rules are testing you, to see where you will back down. They are experts at this.

Let’s imagine that earlier in the period, or perhaps yesterday or a couple of days ago, you took the time to slowly and calmly speak to that student individually. Now the behavior is still continuing.

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Stop instruction and get silent. That’s where your power lies. Take a few calming breaths as you slowly and powerfully walk over to the student, silently channeling your inner 19th century British monarch. You might think to yourself, “I am glad to have an opportunity to support this student and strengthen our relationship in the long run by showing them what kind of leader I am.”

For some classes, the thrill of seeing someone getting in “trouble” is too much, and for those kinds of classes, you will want to provide a distraction. You can use the tried and true strategy of “Turn and Talk” to give everyone something to focus on. You would just stop instruction, as if you planned to do this all along, say to the class, in English, in your normal, unflustered teacher voice, before you get silent and begin walking to the student, “Turn and talk to a partner. Tell them what we learned so far about Shanice’s tournament. Say, ‘This weekend, Shanice will…’ Go!” However you make your calm way over to the student, you will then get down beside them and ask them to step into the hall so you can speak with them later in private. Then stand up, take a couple steps away from the student, and calmly resume instruction.

Do not make a big production of waiting for the student to get up and exit the room. Act as if you have every confidence that the student will comply with your request of their own accord. Remember, in all discipline, the goal is to de-escalate and remove attention from the situation in the heat of the moment.

There is a chance that the student will not comply. In that case, you will want to go back over to the student again after a few minutes and simply repeat the same sequence of steps that you did the first time you spoke with them. Remain calm and non-confrontational, and keep the interaction quiet and private, from your kneeling position by the student’s seat. Remember that the class is watching you (even if you ask them to Turn and Talk again). This interaction is not just about your relationship with this student but your position as leader for the entire class.

So just remain calm and say to the student, “I asked you to wait in the hall. We can have a quick conversation in the hall during class right now, or we can have a more complicated situation. It is your choice. I will keep teaching and wait to see what choice you make when I get up from your seat here.” Then signal calmly to your Concierge to come help the student to the hall. You have ideally chosen a supportive, calm, and kind student for this job, and you have already prepped them for their duties in a situation like this, so they can help coerce their peer into coming to the hall with them.

Calmly continue teaching, walking away from the student. After a minute, look back in a calm, nonchalant way, to see if the student has indeed chosen to go to the hall with the Concierge. If the student has not done so, you will want to call administration. If they cannot or will not come support you, you really have no choice but to continue teaching.

If you cannot call in support from the office, you now have two options. One, at the end of the period, hold the student back so that you can follow up with them in private. Two, tell the class to turn and talk about something, perhaps simply saying, “Turn and tell a partner what we have learned so far about X” where X is whatever you have been talking about. Then as the class talks, follow up with the student. No matter what,

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at this juncture you will want to get in touch with administration, counseling, their coach, if they have one, and the student’s family.

Most students, however, will not put up any resistance and will go on to the hall either of their own accord when you first ask them or with the assistance of the Concierge when you follow up with them.

When you get to a natural pause in the lesson, you can ask students to do some pair work to keep them learning and engaged as you take a few minutes to talk in the hall. You will want to give them an activity that they are familiar with from previous classes, such as Volleyball Reading or Read and Sketch, or an activity that is SO EASY that it is self-explanatory and requires little to no language (especially for classes in their first years).

Two activities that work well for the “so easy” options are: (1) Partner Interest Interviews: Have a stack of short student surveys in English ready to hand out when an occasion like this presents itself. Any survey with about 10 questions will do, but you don’t want it to be too too long, because you probably don’t want to spend the rest of the period on it. You can find lots of student interest inventories on the internet, or you could make your own sets of questions. You might want to have a few versions so you can return to the same activity next time you need to create a smokescreen for Plan D. You can simply ask students to interview a partner and record their answers. You can use the responses in future lessons or just use them to get to know your students’ interests.

(2) Mysterious Person pictures: Ask students to draw a picture about themselves that you can use later as a fun Guided Oral Input activity - the Mysterious Person Game. You might “angle” the picture you ask them to make, to fit your current or upcoming cycle. For example, for Description, you might ask them to draw a place they love to go to relax, or a picture of their elementary school, or for Narration, you might ask them to draw a picture of a time they learned something new, or a time they were scared. Since the Mysterious Person game is a guessing game of whose picture are we talking about, they should write their name on the BACK of their paper. It’s best for the input when you eventually play the Mysterious Person Game if you tell them to include NO WORDS except maybe the names of places, people, and dates, if you think that would enhance the input.

With the rest of the class occupied, you can now slip into the hall for that two to three minute chat.

When you approach the student out in the hall, you will want to use your body language to de-escalate and support a productive conversation that truly leads to change. So you will want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the student, not facing them in a confrontational posture. Mirror their body language. Lean on the wall if they are leaning on the wall, sit if they are sitting. Humans respond more positively to others who mirror their body language back to them.

You do not want to make eye contact with the student during this conversation. Look off into the distance, in the direction that the student is looking. You will now ask a memorized sequence of questions. This takes off a great deal of pressure, as you now simply need to focus on remaining calm, using a non-confrontational posture and a calm tone, breathing, modeling calm energy for the student to respond to, while asking them a series of memorized reflection questions. Here they are: 1. “What was happening?”

If the student says “I dunno” then simply ask again. Do not state the behavior. They need to state it. That way they can own it, and describe it from their perspective. If they say something snarky like, “I was just asking what you were saying!” that is OK, just proceed once they have acknowledged the behavior. Say, Page 59

“Thank you,” and mean it. The student is helping you, complying with your wishes even though they probably do not feel like it. This is big internal work for a child. Acknowledge it. Do not restate, put into “teacher language”, elaborate or add on or correct their response. Simply accept it, thank them, and move on.

If a student refuses to answer, say, “I will come back in a few minutes to see if you have an answer to this question.” Return to the room, leaving the child outside in the hall to reflect. Take deep breaths and remain as calm as always. Do not feed the student any nervous or anxious or angry energy. You want to simply exude calm, assertive, get-it-done energy. If they refuse to talk to you the second time you return, repeat that you will be back. If the third time you attempt to engage with the student, they still stonewall you, then you know that there is a much bigger problem at play here than just Spanish class. Leave them in the hall and follow up later, with administration and counselors and family involvement, if possible.

The majority of students, however, will answer the first time and we can move on to ask the next questions: 2. “How is that a problem for the class?”

Again, do not give up or accept a non-answer, but do thank them for their response. Do not add on, simply allow them to be correct in whatever they say, as long as it is an honest answer to the question.

3. “How is that a problem for me as your teacher?”

You will repeat the same type of interaction as in the first two questions.

4. “How is this going to be a problem for you if it does not stop?”

At this point the student will generally name the consequence they fear most. Generally, the students name calling parents, detentions, or office referrals. If they say, “We will talk in the hall some more,” tell them that this is the last time we will talk in the hall and inform them of a more appropriate consequence.

This sequence is worth studying and memorizing. Having all the steps ready to deploy is extremely soothing for your mental health and boosts your confidence. It is important that you not have to make those decisions when you are in your reptilian brain, and in fight or flight mode.

You will be so glad that you have invested the time to learn self-soothing mechanisms, such as deep breaths and positive self-talk - ways to get you back into a calm headspace so you can support the student in remaining calmer as well. You will also be glad that you have a memorized script to deploy in a mechanical fashion, taking the guesswork and nervousness out of an already-charged situation, having to confront students and correct their behavior.

By the time a student has pushed our classroom management to Plan E, it is time to reach out to principals and counselors. It’s really and truly time. You have done your due diligence, and now you need support.

Many teachers reach out to the office when they should be doing Plans A through D. Working through these steps with your students maintains your leadership, builds relationships, and allows you to use these challenging behaviors as an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your students. Most people tend to avoid conflict, but when it is unavoidable, working through it together in a respectful, collaborative way often actually strengthens your relationships.

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You want to be the one who invests in relationships, not the principal or other staff. Will the principal come down and teach your class for the rest of the year? No. Highly doubtful, So, it is in your best interest to invest YOUR OWN time and emotional energy into Plans A through D, to build your class culture, since you will be living with this group for the rest of the school year.

Plan E, getting outside help, is for those rare students who truly need more support than you can give in a classroom setting. These students have not responded to your very tight management plan. If you faithfully

implement Plans A, B, C, and D, paired with home contacts or support from the student’s coaches and other staff with whom the student has a relationship, then you will be able to winnow out the students who do not respond to calm, assertive, consistent leadership. Thus, you will be left with the students who need intense adult support. It is entirely appropriate at this point to call in extra support.

In fact, it is better than appropriate. It is a good thing. You are getting this student support that they really need. You might very well have unearthed those students who are living with so much pain that they need more services than they are getting in school. Thus, your management can be a community service. It helps the school system identify those students who simply cannot, because of the struggle that their lives are, be part of a community with a calm, centered leader.

If your student-centered curriculum, your focus on comprehension and SLOW, and your strong classroom management system do not support a student in being a successful, positive member of the class, then you have most likely identified a student who has substantial social-emotional needs. Getting this student some help is a real service to the student and the school community, and society at large. You will need to seek assistance from family, administration, counselors, coaches, other teachers, or all of the above.

The fortunate thing is that Plans A through D, plus “Sweating the Small Stuff” (below) create a classroom environment wherein only a very few troubled students will need that level of time-consuming intervention.

Routines, Procedures, and “Sweating the Small Stuff” Jon Cowart, a Spanish teacher, Assistant Principal, and teacher trainer from Memphis, Tennessee, has urged teachers wanting to establish a productive, focused classroom environment to “sweat the small stuff” so that the class follows your leadership with confidence. This means not letting any deviation from the expected routines and procedures slip, ever. This means enforcing your rules, all the time, every time, for every student, all year. Even when it would be more convenient to overlook it. Even when you don’t feel like it.

Even when you really, really like the kid. Even when the kid kinda intimidates you.

The magic of this approach is consistency, predictability, and fairness. So when we are establishing routines and expectations, such as how to enter the classroom, get paper, or prepare to be dismissed, we make sure Page 61

that we explicitly teach and model the procedure. And then every time a student deviates from the procedure, every time, we sweat it. We make the student re-do the procedure, we make a note of their infraction, and we follow up with discipline that progresses from a re-do to a brief talk after class, to seating change, to a call home, to a team meeting with the office, or whatever system works best for your school system.

Sweating the small stuff minimizes the big stuff. If a student knows that there is a consequence for not having a pencil when it is time to write, then they have less mental energy to focus on other naughtiness. They are too busy thinking, ‘Where’s that pencil I need?’”

For your more challenging classes, it is especially important to sweat the small stuff. The key is to be 100% fair and consistent, all the time, with everyone. Period. If kids think sometimes you might just “not feel like” enforcing the rules, then they will test you. This constant testing will wear you out. Better to invest the energy at the beginning of the year teaching them by example, that you will sweat the small stuff, every time. With everyone. Every day. It is even useful to make up extra-strict rules just for the training benefit of your students. For instance, I expect my students to straighten their chairs, pick up everything from the floor, and have silent voices and still bodies. I will wait, sometimes even with my eyes closed, until I feel deep in my bones that the class is at absolute attention. I then tell them a final message in English or the course language, if the group can handle that, and dismiss them.

I could just dismiss them when their voices were off. But I expect this sense of calm, quiet bodies too. Just for the discipline it provides following a difficult instruction. I also expect my students to always hold onto their written work unless they are pencil or clipboard helpers, and turn it into a turn-in box I am holding as they exit. This gives me a chance to ensure that everyone is turning in their work, and perhaps scan for quality and completeness as they hand it in. So on any day with written work, before I dismiss the class, I always look through the turn-in box to make sure that no unauthorized students have turned in their work early (they like to sneak it in so they can beat a more hasty retreat from class than their peers) and I make those kids come retrieve their o’er-hastily-turned-in work. This sends a message to the class. Don’t try to sneak.

Some of us need to train ourselves to be stricter than we even want to be, with these small things. I know I did. I really do not, personally, care all that much. But I have come to prize the leadership it develops in my teaching, when I choose some routines and procedures to “sweat” and enforce consistently and fairly, to train the class and give them a sense of achievement in controlling their behavior.

Student Engagement is the Best Classroom Management Tool Really, for the majority of students, simply leading an interesting class is the strongest tool we have to ensure smooth classroom management. When students are engaged, they are easy to manage, as per the saying in sports that “the best defense is a good offense”. One key to engagement is to incorporate students’ lives and interests into the curriculum. Small Talk and Card Talk are superstars at that. One Word Images and personal stories, and Class or Community Surveys are excellent as well. There are many ways to incorporate students’ personalities and passions into the lessons in Stepping Stones; that is what they are, by and large, designed for.

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Chapter 5: Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and an Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies In proficiency-based teaching - especially with beginners - our only job is to exchange messages that the students understand and find interesting enough to attend to. If the messages can reach the level of compelling, that is ideal. But it is important to remember that simply hearing messages in a new language that they can comprehend effortlessly actually feels quite magical to most students. So, even the most basic discussion of the calendar or weather can feel quite compelling when the language is skillfully used in a calm, slow way, with copious visual support. The strategies outlined below have helped me achieve compellinginput status more often.

Are my students always, constantly listening with rapt attention? No, of course not. 180 days is a long time and I cannot always provide compelling experiences. Sometimes I am tired, or I have a cold, or the kids are not “with it” for whatever reason. Life happens. So we learn to go easy on ourselves. We strive for “interesting” and bask in the times when we hit “compelling”.

Providing understandable and interesting spoken and written messages to students is the backbone of proficiency-based instruction, especially in lower-level classes. There exists an unlimited number of activities that we can use to deliver these messages. This book presents what I consider to be the very best best bang for the buck in a sequence of instruction that builds upon itself, leading you from one activity to the other in a progression that helps you develop your skills. The activities I have chosen, therefore, are not simply good activities - they have the added advantage of providing you, the teacher, with a program of professional skill development. As you deliver an engaging, personalized, colorful instructional program with time-tested activities like One Word Images, your students will be developing their language proficiency and you will also be growing as you strengthen your language delivery skills. It’s a win-win for everybody.

You will work your way up through activities that increase in complexity through the course of the book. What follows in this chapter is a brief overview of the year-long curricular framework and the activities in the order in which they appear in this book, where they are described in step-by-step detail.

Please note that the Stepping Stones curricular framework is a framework, which means that it is a “container” or “organizational system” for strategies and content. It is not the content itself. Once you internalize this framework, you will be able to select from the wide array of strategies and content that is out there for communicative language teaching. There are so many excellent ideas! But without a framework or organizing system, these ideas can overwhelm us. Where to fit this cool new strategy? How to assess it?

Stepping Stones was designed to be larger than any specific content or strategy. You can think of it like the Dewey Decimal system versus a specific book. The curricular framework is the Dewey Decimal system. It tells you where the specific book “fits” into the whole system of the library. Stepping Stones can show you the natural place to “shelve” the specific strategies and content (the “books”) in your curricular plans.

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In order to provide a training ground or “on ramp” to Stepping Stones, I have selected the Description, Narration, and Information cycles (you could also call them “units”) for you to use during your transition. This combination will provide a gradual development of your skills as you move through the three cycles. Each cycle is based on a “genre” or language function (e.g. Description, Information).

Each cycle is designed to last about six weeks total. Within the four “phases” (or “mini-units”) that provide a pivot point, that shifts the content and literacy focus within the larger “genre.”

However, these phases (and the cycles themselves) are designed to be modular, meaning that you can skip some of them and still deliver a strong, literacy-focused, meaningful learning pathway through the year.

Below, you will find the entire curricular framework, followed by an overview of each cycle.

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cycles are

The Stepping Stones Cycles of Instruction (Note: in this book, we will use ONLY Cycles One, Two, and Four.)

Cycle One: Description How people, places, and things look, sound, smell, feel, etc using sensory details, personality & physical traits, and comparing/contrasting cultural practices, products, and perspectives, and comparing descriptions in the past and present time.

Cycle Two: Narration Stories of what happened, who said what, who thought what, who wanted what, where they went, and how they solved their problem or achieved their goals. This cycle, like all the cycles, is divided into four "phases" that focus on (1) personal stories, (2) imaginative/literary stories, (3) cultural stories, and (4) historical stories.

Cycle Three: Going Deeper with Narration Stories with more "writer's craft" such as stronger and more meaningful descriptions, dialogue and thinking that reveals more about the characters, and commentary on the significance or importance of the narrative, culturally, historically, or personally.

Cycle Four: Information Teaching about content (e.g. culture, geography, history, significant places, celebrations, global challenges, the environment), using facts, examples, and short stories to provide details, in well-organized writing and speech to lead through the topic and teach topicspecific vocabulary.

Cycle Five: Opinion Stating and supporting opinions on topics of personal relevance (e.g. holidays, school subjects, family responsibilities, activities, locations, clothing, food) with reasons or facts that explain the opinion (e.g. data from surveys, facts, personal stories, or quotations) to show examples of why one might hold that opinion.

Cycle Six: Argument Constructing arguments to support a claim and refute possible counterclaims by situating the claim in its historical context, citing and explaining evidence and reasons from credible sources with authority on the subject, and addressing and dismissing counterclaims by refuting their evidence/authority.

Optional: Writing to Make a Difference in the World Creating lasting resources for future students, or to memorialize the year’s learning in a tangible way for the current students to take with them, such as the Classroom Library Books Project, the Festival of Worksheets, Class Storybooks, Film Festivals, or Class Yearbooks.

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This book will lead you through the “Foundations” sequence illustrated below. Don’t worry too much about these cycles and phases at this point. The book will lead you step by step through the phases so you understand them by doing, so you are prepared to continue on to the full Stepping Stones framework in later years, if you want to deepen your work with these literacy-focused cycles. Below is a complete list of all the phases. You DO NOT need to understand these fully now; just take a look to get your bearings.

After working through this book, you should be able to return to this page and understand how everything fits together, so that you can begin to “tweak” the content and go forward for the rest of your career with a solid system to organize and sequence your instruction.

The Foundations Phases Describing Setting Describing Preferences Describing People Inside and Out Describing in the Past and Present Narrating Personal Stories Narrating Imaginative/Literary Stories Narrating Cultural Stories

Organizing Information Writing Teaching Vocabulary

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The Daily Instructional Framework (Excerpted from Stepping Stones) Teachers all over the place tell me that their top concerns in their communicative language classrooms are (1) how to sequence their instruction and (2) how to assess and measure student progress in a way that shows students that even though it “feels easy”, they are actually making progress in their language abilities.

A close third is how to stop the sense of overwhelm as they feel they are recreating the wheel day after day and chasing new instructional strategies without a sense of how they fit together. It is my sincere hope that this seven-step daily lesson plan and four-phase unit planning model will help teachers to find solutions to all three of those common problems, so that proficiency-oriented language teaching can become smoother, more relaxing, and more joyful, with less planning, less uncertainty, and less stress for everyone involved — teachers and students alike.

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What a Daily Lesson Framework Does for You Working with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) materials for ten years trained me to appreciate a flexible, student-centered daily lesson structure that can be repeated day after day, unit after unit, and year after year without becoming stale. It was actually quite the contrary to becoming stale; I found that using their well-structured lesson plan template allowed me and my students to be more creative and more responsive to emerging ideas and needs, because the cognitive load of “what are we going to do today?” was removed, for all of us.

This freed me up to be more present to my students. It also allowed me to plan lessons very quickly, because I only had to find an appropriate way to introduce the teaching point and think about the writing or reading I wanted to model for the class, in order to illustrate it, and the rest of the lesson was able to run on auto-pilot.

Developing an instructional framework with a repeating daily and unit structure, and a limited repertoire of flexible strategies that can be used to deliver many different kinds of content without growing “old” or “stale” has allowed me to really put the brakes on the lesson planning hamster wheel. I hardly plan at all, most days.

Sometimes during my prep, I go outside and sit in the sun and listen to a meditation. Literally.

How can I plan so little? It is because the only part of class I really need to plan on a regular basis is the 12 to 15 minutes that we spend in the Guided Oral Input portion of the day’s lesson (#3 in the graphic above), when the students and I are co-creating a new experience using the language to communicate.

The rest of the daily lesson framework is pretty much on auto-pilot as the information and language from the Guided Oral Input is recycled through the four parts of the framework that come after the input: Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment. The strategies used in each of these four lesson components can be reused again and again, so they do not require much, if any, preparation, once you have learned and practiced a few strong strategies.

Once you understand how to use this framework, your lesson planning usually takes only about five to fifteen minutes of preparation per day, but still allows you to teach robust and varied lessons full of language and cool information, presented in engaging, interactive ways. Another very important benefit is that this daily and unit framework gives structure, but not so much that it takes away your ability to be creative, teach about things that you love, and connect with your students in a meaningful, personal, responsive way. That is how it was designed: to give structure you can live and grow with.

See the Appendices for sample lesson, unit, and term/year planning sheets.

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Chapter 6: Your Gradebook Sadly, many teachers today end up with students who have not gained much in the way of language proficiency even after years of language study, and whose grades have communicated to them that they aren’t really cut out for this whole language learning thing. It’s time for those days to be over.

We can and must do more for our students. We want them to gain true proficiency and happiness while they are with us. We want them to leave our classrooms wanting more of what we have given them during our time with us, wanting to keep finding ways to interact with the language and gaining further proficiency. Above all, we want to communicate that they are smart people, whose brains are amazingly well-suited, as all human brains are, to slipping almost magically into the ability to use our languages to express and understand real, authentic communication.

Dr. Krashen has said that the goal of our language programs should be to equip the student with a proficiency level that allows them to to make the world their classroom, able to take in input from the real world and continue to build higher proficiency when they exit our programs. We want our grades to build students’ selfconfidence so that, when they leave us, they are motivated and eager to continue their language learning journey, as Krashen suggests.

This book is not offered as just another book on second language acquisition. It is written as a challenge to world language teachers to make a strong decision to make a break with the kinds of instruction that have come before us. We can now seek the new.

The Messages Your Gradebook Sends Everyone can effortlessly achieve proficiency in the language they are studying with you, just as they did in their mother tongue. But to fully absorb that truth, and communicate it to students, teachers must finally begin to look at their work with their students through the lens of how people actually acquire languages. If we do that we will know that the only factor preventing all of our students from achieving is really nothing more than our own mindset and commitment to their success.

That bears repeating.

The only reason that all our students are not achieving is us.

Our instructional practices.

Our assessment practices.

Our mindset.

Our expectations.

If we have the right instructional and assessment practices, mindset, and expectations, all of our students can achieve. This is a powerful, and humbling truth. It means that the buck stops here, with us. We can set up Page 69

the conditions for all to succeed. And not just to “give away” the grades, but for students to actually earn those good grades, doing things that feel natural and easy and even enjoyable. What a beautiful vision.

So, how can we achieve that?

First, we need to think deeply about the truth that, barring severe cognitive or physical limitations, practically all people can effortlessly communicate complex messages in their first language(s).

Our students have already proven that they can acquire language. Only people who live with the most profound physical and mental challenges lack the ability to acquire language proficiency from the right kind of environment.

Each and every student can successfully build a mental representation of the language in their minds, and from this representation they can, after a period of time, begin to form utterances to express meaning. The proof of this? Just listen to them in the hall. Yak, yak, yak! Even the “slowest” student in your class can most likely hold forth at length, with all kinds of colorful language, and even highlyspecialized vocabulary, when you get them going on a topic they know a lot about and feel strongly about, like hunting or soccer trivia, or cheerleading, fixing cars, social justice, or fashion.

So, they can all achieve this in another language, given the right circumstances. However, students cannot control the rate and pace of that acquisition any more than a two-year-old can control the rate and pace of their own acquisition of their native language.

What does influence a two-year-old’s acquisition is the richness of the language that they hear around them, the amount of time their caregivers spend interacting with them, how much print material they see and interact with, and - perhaps most importantly - how they feel when they are being spoken to.

Therefore, like parents concerned with optimally developing their toddler’s L1 acquisition, we work to give our students an emotionally-supportive learning environment rich in texts and spoken language. From this environment, students can take what they need to build the language inside their minds, at the rate and pace that are natural for them. Each student will have a different timeline. Still, all can succeed.

In fact, some of the “slow” students in level classes one often turn out to be the most solid acquirers by level three. Our gradebooks must reflect the following truth: All can succeed, as long as they are being evaluated according to their own internal timeline.

We must reward growth, focus, and interaction with the language. We must NOT base our grades on the ability to produce (usually memorized) language on an arbitrary timeline set by external, and often for-profit, organizations, such as textbook companies and national exams of grammar.

There are so many factors that come into play in the rate and pace of a particular student’s language acquisition. Their already-established literacy is an important factor. The richer a student’s existing Page 70

vocabulary in their stronger language(s), the more cognates they will recognize in the new language, if it is a cognate-rich language for them.

The more reading and decoding skills they have already developed, the stronger, faster, and more confident they will be when approaching text in the new language. The more confidence they have in general, overall literacy, the more robust their self-concept as a student will be, and the more risks they will be apt to take.

And then there are learning differences, neurodiversity, the effects of poverty, mental health concerns -- so many factors influencing how quickly students will acquire the language and develop proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing.

So, what should we base our grades on? We should base them on what students can control, and not on what they cannot control, in an acquisition-focused classroom.

Grading What Students Can Control We do not base our grades on correctly outputting a certain verb form, or being able to answer memorized questions with memorized phrases, or being able to memorize vocabulary lists. We do not grade our students on their progress through the ACTFL Proficiency Levels, because each student must necessarily progress through the levels at their own pace.

Besides, students’ progress through the proficiency levels is so slow as to not provide sufficient data for grading students with any degree of accuracy. In a proficiency-oriented setting where students are interacting with the language for the majority of their class time, the majority of first-year students advance extremely rapidly up to Intermediate Low on writing performance tasks, and Intermediate High/Advanced Low on listening and reading performance tasks. They tend to stay there for the entire year.

Instead, we base our grades, for the most part, on the most important element of language acquisition students’ attention to, comprehension of, and interaction with messages that we provide them in class.

Each student makes progress in building proficiency at their own pace. Students cannot consciously control that pace. Therefore it would be highly inequitable, not to mention nerve-wracking, for students if we were to base their grades upon hitting certain proficiency targets on a pre-determined timeline.

Grades should be based on students’ production of work in class – listening, reading, writing, and speaking during the class’s activities.

Our grades thus reflect our students’ performance in: ● ● ● ●

Demonstrating comprehension of the input, through responding to oral or written questions and through maintaining a flow of conversation in the language Reading texts during free-choice reading time, using them as a tool for language acquisition and working to find texts that offer sufficient challenge while also feeling easy and mostly comprehensible Demonstrating more and more complete reading and listening comprehension, of increasinglycomplex, abstract, and/or unfamiliar passages, about a wider and wider variety of topics Writing and speaking at an appropriate level and working to outgrow themselves by setting writing/ speaking goals and using tools to begin incorporating traits of strong writing in various genres (e.g.

Description, Information, etc.)

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Since the only elements under our students’ conscious control are really the quality of their attention to the input (with modified expectations to differentiate for students with learning differences or emotional challenges, etc.), and their goal-setting and tool-making to help them make progress in stronger writing and speech in the various genres, then we need to design their grades to support them in developing better attention and engagement with the material in class.

Grade in Ways That Reward and Encourage Interaction with the Language in Class In our proficiency-based teaching, we are not able to exert control over students’ rates of acquisition, nor can we force a certain structure to be acquired. Through conscious learning - Language Study and Writing Focus Days - we can effect memorization and even form manipulation, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about doing that, as long as we take equity and student self-esteem into consideration when grading students’ ability to control forms (more about this important topic is found in the Appendices). We just need to remember that this is learning not acquisition. Acquisition is not under our conscious control.

To build our students’ acquired competence, the only thing we can do is provide spoken and written language that the students find interesting enough to attend to and that they can understand, while we also set up classrooms and gradebooks that support students’ attention to the messages we provide.

If we are to truly align our instruction and assessment with the standards and proficiency goals, then our objective in language instruction must become very simple: We must provide messages that students can comprehend.

These can be about any topic, as long as they are interesting enough to compel students’ attention, and we must use language - any language, any words, any verb tense or structure - that the students can comprehend to deliver those messages.

We do not have to make sure that students comprehend every single word in the messages. We have to make sure that they comprehend the overall message. The words and pieces will sort themselves out in their own time. We can’t control it.

We must provide scaffolding in the form of writing, translation, gestures, visual aids, and actions, to support students’ comprehension. We can ask students to take notes on a graphic organizer to show that they are understanding the messages we are conveying to them. They can write in the course language, or in any other language, or simply sketch. We can grade their notes based on how many details they are able to extract from the input, or for completion.

We must provide support for attention and engagement with a strong classroom management system that creates a calm, quiet environment for listening and reading. If we cannot provide this, then it is very difficult for all students to succeed.

We must provide repetitions of the language that was presented during Guided Oral Input, continuing on to Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment.

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We must make a variety of texts available to them for free-choice reading so that each student can find texts that are interesting and comprehensible.

In short, we must provide linguistic data in the form of interesting spoken and written messages, with plenty of built-in repetitions, and a calm, focused classroom in which to process it. These repetitions are already pre-planned for you in the structure of the Daily Instructional Framework, because the language and concepts that you present during Guided Oral Input is recycled in different ways through continuing on to Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment, and perhaps also during Reading Workshop in the following lesson, if you choose to bring the class’s Shared Writing text back to students in the Reading Workshop of follow-up lessons.

This means that you do not have to worry about how many times you use a certain word or language structure during Guided Oral Input; you can simply focus your attention during the input portion of the lesson on making the messages comprehensible, checking for understanding, and student engagement/ classroom management.

We can model and teach traits of strong discourse in the genre (e.g. Narration) during our lessons, and model tools, during Shared Writing, such as anchor charts or graphic organizers, that activate conscious, metacognitive knowledge of how strong discourse in that genre tends to go.

For example, we can use a Story Mountain graphic organizer in the Narration cycle to cue us to include a setting, a problem, and a solution, which are traits of strong narrative discourse. Or we could use a post-it reminder with words like “said” and “thought” on it, to cue us to include inner thinking and dialogue in our stories, another trait of strong narratives.

In the Stepping Stones approach, two things are happening simultaneously.

First, students are developing acquired competence, on their own timeline, which cannot be altered or hurried, except by giving more input. Our students then take from that data the building blocks of their own mental representation of the language, on their own internal timeline.

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Grading students on how fast they are able to build that mental representation is not equitable, or even realistic, or even useful in helping build language proficiency, considering the uncontrollable, unconscious, and immutable nature of language acquisition.

The other thing that is happening is we are using a literacy-focused, workshop-style approach to model and teach traits of strong writing in the various genres. So, in Cycle One Phase One (Describing Settings), the first writing focus is “using sensory details,” or in other words, adjectives that describe how a place looks, feels, sounds, etc. We might make a list of “sensory details” on an anchor chart, as we work through the lessons. For beginners, this list will be quite simple, of course. Most likely it will list terms like “hot” and “cold” and “a little” and “very.” For upper-level students, these might be idiomatic weather expressions or sayings, or comparisons, or superlatives, or other ways to include sensory details about a setting.

However, the learning objective is not to be able to say “very hot” or “a little cold” or whatever specific terms ended up on the chart as you taught the lessons in the phase. The learning objective is to get stronger at using sensory details. So, a student might not remember all the specific words (or they might!), but we can expect that if they have been paying attention in class during the four to eight lessons in a typical phase, that they will have the ability to say some terms about the details of a setting.

And if we ask students to make themselves tools, like word lists or post-it notes, or graphic organizers, and try those tools as supports while they write or speak for a grade, then we are simply supporting them to interact more deeply with the input, for a purpose, and our assessments become a learning opportunity just like regular class.

Our assessments will then naturally convey to the students the very important and very true message that they are naturally very good at language acquisition.

It’s All About Building Students’ Confidence and Positive Self-Concept Each student needs to do no more than attend to the meaning conveyed in the messages we provide them, in written and spoken form. Especially during the first two years, students should never, ever be made to feel that they are not making adequate progress because they are not reaching the same benchmarks as their peers on some arbitrary timeline. Our assessments must give students tangible evidence that they are making progress so that they can feel pride in their abilities, from the beginning, and without interruption or even the slightest hint that their efforts are not resulting in the desired outcomes. This is why World Language teachers need better learning progressions, such as the rubrics and continua in Stepping Stones. They are, as far as I can tell, the most complete and useful set of assessment tools that have yet been developed for World Language programs.

These assessment tools are designed to show students in a very tangible, concrete way, how they are growing stronger, step by step. This builds motivation, which is so important for student success in our courses. If our students do not feel that their efforts are being rewarded by a growing ability to comprehend and eventually produce messages in the language, many of them will lose their motivation.

This, sadly, happens all the time. If students receive enough messages indicating that they are not good at learning languages (usually through feedback on errors in their work, correction in class, or through Page 74

instructional practices that put students on the spot, such as asking individual students, “What did I just say?”), then many will begin to lose faith in themselves and in their innate ability to build a mental representation of the language.

When students lose confidence they, lose focus. Loss of focus leads to disengagement, and disengaged students do not comprehend because they are not paying attention to class. This leads to a further loss of confidence because students feel lost, and also to classroom management problems, as the disengaged students have more motivation to act up and disrupt class. These disruptions can make it more difficult for everyone to attend to the input, which decreases everyone’s motivation and enjoyment of the class. It is a negative feedback loop. The negativity thus experienced by my “lazy” or “disengaged” students is usually fully attributable to my failure to make sure that I am delivering messages that all of my students understand.

If we are to indeed fulfill our school mission statements to serve all learners, and we intend to live up to the promise of communicative language teaching, which is that everyone can do it, then we must avoid entering into that negative feedback loop at all costs.

Students’ self-concept as language learners is fragile. We teachers must take great care not to erode this allimportant foundation of confidence through conveying to students that their listening and reading efforts are not bearing adequate fruit. The efforts required from students to sustain focus on our messages and the rigorous mental work that they must do in order to comprehend on a daily basis meaning in a new language should be their only concern. It is concern enough.

Students’ self-concept as language acquirers can be almost irrevocably damaged by even one message that indicates that they do not measure up to expectations. Thus, our only expectation at the beginning stages of language instruction should be attention to, and comprehension of, the spoken and written messages that we are conveying. This, truly, is the only factor over which anyone has have control in the process, and the responsibility for providing understandable messages rests fully upon our shoulders as proficiency-based instructors. If students are not comprehending the messages they hear and read, then we must take the responsibility for slowing down, rephrasing, repeating, or scaffolding with visual supports or translation.

It has been said that “a flood of input must precede a trickle of output,” meaning that we would expect students’ performance in the receptive skills of listening and reading to outpace their productive skills in writing or speaking output. The assessment tools in Stepping Stones are designed to accommodate this reality; the receptive performance targets are, from the beginning, set higher than the productive language targets for writing and speaking.

See “Performance Guidelines for the First Two Years” in the Appendices for more specific examples of learning targets and typical student performance at various levels, for summative assessments at the end of the first four semesters (year one and year two) of working Page 75

with the Stepping Stones curricular frameworks and materials.

Our Gradebook Categories I set up my gradebooks with categories for both formative and summative assessment. If my school required me to weight the formatives and summates using a certain percentage, even if the percentages were not the way I would personally prefer, these assessments will work, regardless. It honestly does not matter how you weight these grades.

The more important considerations are that you use a consistent structure and format in your assessments and consistent assessment tools (e.g. rubrics, continua) over the course of the

Examp le of a wr iting

term or term(s). A portfolio system of regular performance assessments in reading, writing, listening, and perhaps speaking allows students to lay their collection of work samples out and see evidence of real, measurable growth in concrete, meaningful skills. For example, they can see their progress in writing more complex sentences with clauses and conjunctions, or incorporating more dialogue and inner thinking into narratives, or using organizational phrases in their informational writing or speech.

Exam ples of rubr ics

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Our gradebooks often have a lot of “cooks” in the “kitchen” looking over our shoulders, adding a dash of spice here, or substituting an ingredient there, in efforts to improve the department’s or building’s grading practices.

Administrators and departmental agreements often mandate certain gradebook setups one year or semester, and then adjust or change the requirements, so that the next year or semester, teachers need to readjust.

Stepping Stones was designed to “roll with the punches,” meaning that, since I have been through many different administrators, in several schools, and in multiple districts and programs, and also worked with teachers in many different situations, I designed the assessment systems and tools to be flexible enough to fit into a variety of possible grading setups, since they seem to be constantly changing. And, at this point, teachers faced with all kinds of requirements have ben successfully using and adapting the assessments in Stepping Stones, for three years now, and I have yet to work with a teacher whose gradebook requirements, no matter how specific and onerous they seem at first glance, have created any real impediment to implementing the assessment systems provided in this book. After seeing the success, flexibility, and adaptability of these measurement tools and systems, used in a wide variety of teaching contexts, I can confidently assert that they truly represent the next generation of World Language assessment practices and tools.

The Meeting with My Boss That Led to This Book I clearly remember the meeting in which I decided to take on the task of creating these materials. It was in late 2016, and I was debriefing a recent class period with Mr. Kellen, my supervisor. We were looking at some of my students’ portfolios, which at the time we were assessing with a general rubric derived from the ACTFL performance descriptors: Novice Low, Mid, High, Intermediate Low, and so on.

Mr. Kellen’s question to me that day was, “How do students see their progress when they go to Intermediate Mid writing performance by the time we completed the first round of portfolio assessment in early October of the first year, but then they are still at Intermediate Mid six months later?”

My response was, “That’s just how it works; it takes students a long time to grow from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid, and that process is out of my control. Students just need to listen and read, and the process of language acquisition will proceed on its own timeline, which we cannot alter or hurry.”

Most administrators do not like to hear “I can’t measure that, and I don’t actually care about it all that much,” which, while technically true, is not how schools are designed these days, with all the data and accountability that we are expected to demonstrate. So, understandably, my boss pushed me on my statement and assumption. If he had not pushed me that day, Stepping Stones might never have existed. But he did push me, saying, “Be that as it may, Tina, there surely must exist some assessment tools that would show World Language students more tangible progress, in smaller, more achievable increments than the huge jumps in the ACTFL performance descriptors.”

I replied, with growing frustration, “Actually, they do not exist. I have attended many ACTFL and World Language trainings, and I have looked far and wide, but I have not seen any tools for World Language that are as finely-tuned and student-friendly, with concrete, “next-steps” learning targets, as what I had when I was

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teaching English Language Arts (ELA), using the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) assessment materials.”

At that moment, Mr. Kellen and I looked at each other, and I felt a little nervous because I knew what I was going to say next would have a huge impact on my life. I went on, “I have thought about developing some assessment materials for World Language modeled on the TCRWP materials, but right now it is just an idea I have. And I have never seen anything like this for language teachers, so I am not sure it will even work.” But we both knew that I was basically signing myself up for years of work developing, implementing, tinkering, and experimenting with some new assessment tools that would give me the same kind of powerful data on my French and Spanish students’ performance that we had used in ELA. Reader, I did it. I did create those kind of assessment tools. And, four and a half years later, you are now holding a book containing the results of that research and experimentation. My very sincere hope is that these tools spare you from having to endure these same kinds of conversations with your boss, especially because I have huge doubts that teachers who have not experienced the kind of powerful assessment tools (from TCRWP) that I had used for ten years in English Language Arts (or ELA) would be hard-pressed to even know where to begin in developing the same kind of tools for World Language, simply because it is unlikely that teachers would envision what we have never seen before, and there are, I have discovered, quite few World Language teachers who have also been trained in using the kinds of powerful assessment practices and tools that I was so fortunate to learn through the TCRWP. I want to stress here that I am not some kind of special, magical unicorn. This is not due to any personal attributes or deficiencies on the part of World Language teachers. Rather, it is simply due to the extensive training I received from TCRWP over the years that I spent as an ELA, Social Studies, and Reading Intervention teacher, and the years of experience I had logged using their excellent assessment tools with a wide variety of students in my classes. I was simply in the unique position of having learned and implemented some tools and skills that did exactly what my supervisor was now asking me to do in World Language. It was a matter of being in the right place with the right knowledge at the right time. Now, you are in the right place at the right time, too.

In this book, you have the fruits of all those years I spent nerding out on literacy assessment, using the most powerful tools that exist for ELA, and the years I spent reworking my World Language assessment tools, to arrive at the rubrics, continua, and assessment practices that you have in this book.

That conversation with my principal, and all the other ones that we had over the years, was not exactly a pleasant experience for me. But the result is very pleasing indeed, because they pushed me to develop these tools, and they have helped so many teachers to make sense of the often-confusing question of what to measure in students’ performance, and how to communicate growth in a set-by-step way that gives more finely-gradated learning targets than the ACTFL levels.

The formative, daily, assessments measure students’ performance in interpersonal communication (which includes listening and speaking), listening comprehension, reading comprehension, presentational writing, and the skills that support a strong reading habit and a strong writing practice. These are all described more fully later in this book in the assessment chapters that accompany each instructional cycle. The summative Page 78

assessments are also performance assessments, collected in students’ portfolios, that measure reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and writing and speaking production. These are described in detail in the assessment chapters.

Some World Language teachers are required to enter grades in the four domains of listening, reading, writing, and speaking. You will find assessment options for both summative and formative assessments in all these domains.

Grading In the Appendices, you will find a very useful document called “Performance Guidelines for the First Two Years,” in which you will find outlines of performance targets in various contexts (familiar and unfamiliar topics and passages), descriptions of suggested assessment tasks for various levels, and suggested grades and performance levels — Exceeding, Meeting, Developing, Emerging, and Redo — for the first two years of this literacy-based World Language instruction. But first some thoughts on gradebook setup and grading student performance.

You can enter the portfolio grades into your “summative” or “testing” category, under “reading”, “writing”, “listening”, and “speaking” if that is how you have your grade book set up. You can weight them anything you want, from 10% of the final grade to 70% or more. In fact, you can weight your grades any way you want or need to. If you are required to give tests of conscious knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, my suggestion is to weight that as little as possible, or just count it as a “feedback” grade, if you can swing that with your administrator. Not your colleagues, your administrator. Go straight to your administrator. Your students’ selfconcepts as language learners are on the line; the boat-rocking you might be doing with your grown-up adult colleagues is, to my way of thinking, worth any temporary discomfort, considering the hundreds and hundreds of students’ experiences that you stand to improve with a shift to portfolio performance assessment.

Communicating these Changes to Your Administrator Go to your administrator. Tell them that you have been reading a book on constructively-aligned curriculum and assessment that is backwards designed from the national standards (and, depending on your specific state, possibly your state standards as well), and designed to measure performance in cross-curricular literacy goals aligned to World Language standards and to some of the Common Core literacy standards.

Tell them that you want to shift your assessments towards these literacy goals in your language course. Tell them that you want to assess student performance on their literacy skills in the Narrative, Descriptive, Informational, Opinion, and Argument genres by collecting work samples of performance in listening, reading, writing, and speaking, over time, in increasingly-challenging contexts and with increasingly-complex and unfamiliar passages and topics. Tell them that you want to increase students’ eyes-on-text time and you want to use daily modeled writing of strong literacy skills to explicitly unpack literacy in your daily lessons. Tell them that you want to make the criteria for success in these literacy skills transparent and achievable by breaking them down through the use of anchor charts and scaffolds for speaking and writing that align to the desired performance targets on the rubrics and continua.

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And then, if you have a shared assessment on grammar or vocabulary, tell them that you will be teaching more grammar and language than you can assess with the shared assessment, so you will need a more robust, authentic assessment of their performance in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Tell them that therefore you either want to revisit the content of the shared assessment or use it as an “informational” grade to provide feedback on the grammar or language that you need to re-teach. Explain to them that you plan to use PACE lessons (i.e. “Presentation, Attention, CoConstruction, Extension” lessons, explained in detail in the Appendices) to teach grammar in a constructivist way, asking students to use higher-order thinking to analyze language samples to construct their own understanding of the features of the language, so they develop more lasting, durable understandings of the required grammar.

It is a rare administrator who will not be interested in such an approach to language teaching. So, once their interest is piqued and you have whetted their appetite for the changes you intend to implement, then “reel in the fish;” tell them that you would like to form a PLC or study team, to look at the assessment systems you are using in the building or district. This shows your willingness to work collaboratively with your colleagues. Ask your administrator when they are available to meet with the team. You need to ask this with authority, as if you assume that they will, of course, want to support this important reform in the way you teach languages.

If you do not have common assessments, or they are not assessments of conscious knowledge of the language, and you are basing your gradebook almost entirely, or entirely, on the assessment tools provided in this book, then it actually does not matter much how you weight your grades. Using these assessment tools and teaching in the way outlined in this book, no matter how you weight your grades, most of your students will very, very likely be making As and Bs. This is because you have been “teaching for mastery”.

Teaching for mastery is when your assessment is aligned with your instruction, your instruction is aligned to standards, and you are teaching the way the brain learns. The pedagogy exists in every subject area for every teacher in the world to be teaching for mastery. Assigning grades of “failing” to our students — unless we are talking about those who do not come to class, that is — could truly be a thing of the past. This could happen right now, if we all got straight on a very important point.

They Can All Do It Everyone can learn. Especially a language. Everyone, unless they have severe cognitive or physical impairments, the kind that mean they cannot speak any language, including their mother tongue, can develop the ability to speak and understand another language. They all speak at least one language as proficiently as we hope to have our students speak by the end of the typical two- or three-year program: they can all Page 80

describe and narrate in all time frames, and speak of topics of general interest, and string together paragraphs topics that matter to them, at least in spoken language.

And even though everyone will not reach the same levels of skill, or literacy, or ability, everyone can get stronger today than they were yesterday, and stronger this year than they were last year. Even if the progress is in very small increments, and even if it is slower than the “bell curve” of the rest of the class, everyone can make progress in the language, day by day, if they show up to class, listen with the intent to understand, and engage in the L2 interactions that we plan for them. In fact, it is actually almost impossible not to make progress in language development just simply by being in an environment in which the language is being used extensively, in a comprehensible manner, to talk about interesting things.

If you want proof that they can all learn a language, just listen to them speaking the languages they already know! They have already done it once. They have already acquired a language, or maybe more than one.

We just need to provide the conditions under which they can replicate the process, and adjust the instruction to match the developmental and cognitive abilities of people who are (by and large) already at least somewhat literate, or who are already receiving literacy instruction (in the case of primary learners) in at least one language.

Why do we have students failing left and right if everyone is naturally gifted with the ability to acquire language proficiency? Some of the factors that impede students’ academic success are, indeed, beyond our control. A parenting student, or one with health problems, or who is dealing with homelessness or addiction, often feels they have bigger fish to fry than Spanish class. These students need our support in class, and they also need stronger, wraparound support, from Social Services, outside organizations, school administrators, and the school counseling team. But why do students who attend class regularly and even put forth an effort still fail? This is not what education is all about. We want all of our students to succeed, grow, and learn. It is generally the foundation of our organizations’ missions.

Just take a look around your average school’s website, brochures, or flyers, or even the slides at the back-toschool teacher inservices. Most likely, you will not have to look too far to bump into a district and school mission statement that says something like, “All learners will succeed” or “Every student will achieve” or “All students can learn.”

We want this for our students, we want all learners to achieve, but we do not always act like that is true. We have a notion, even when we are aiming for language acquisition, which, as noted above, is firmly within the grasp of almost each and every student, we still have a notion that our grade distribution should look like a bell curve. A few Fs, some Ds, a lot of Cs, some Bs, and a few As. This notion is rooted in the factory model of education: sorting the “product” (the young human beings we teach) into “grades” or “levels of quality” and communicating to them if they are of above-average, average, or below-average (or even “failing”) quality.

This is a damaging and tragic notion that is based on the expectation that not everyone can achieve. It’s especially tragic in language courses, because we know that everyone can accomplish the goal of language acquisition. To continue belaboring the point, because it is of such foundational importance: they all already speak at least one language. They have thus proven that they can do it. If they are not making progress in our language classes, it is because we teachers have not set up the proper conditions for that to occur. Or Page 81

we are not measuring the right data, to show that they are, in fact, acquiring the language as they move through our programs.

There is a way to reform our approach to grading that does operate from the assumption that everyone can achieve the learning targets. Standards-based grading, also known as “proficiency-based grading,” holds forth the expectation that all students will meet the learning targets. Even if teachers need to give multiple opportunities and multiple ways for them to demonstrate their proficiency at, say, solving quadratic equations in a math course, or analyzing the significance of a minor character upon the development of the main character in an English course, in a proficiency-based or standards-based grading system, this is the expectation.

The expectation in standards-based, or proficiency-based, grading is that everyone can achieve a “proficient” level of performance, but that some students might take longer or need re-teaching in a different way, or need a different method of demonstrating their performance — perhaps speaking aloud to the teacher to show their analysis of the minor character’s influence, or making a PowerPoint or YouTube video in which they explain how to solve a quadratic equation.

So, why the fear that we are “giving too many As” in our standardsaligned, carefully-designed World Language programs? Under a proficiency-based grading system, we would be held up as “teaching for mastery the first time,” as long as we had standardsbased data to prove that our students are indeed, performing at the desired level. Portfolio assessment and properly-designed rubrics and assessment continua do just that. Portfolio assessment leaves a trail of tangible breadcrumbs that anyone can follow, to prove that we are not just “handing out” As but are, instead, teaching in a powerful, brain-based way that supports all students to achieve, grow, and learn, just like the school mission statement most likely says.

Be proud of your work, and wear your long lists of As and Bs like a badge of honor. You are in the forefront of education reform, which is, ultimately, societal reform that does not bear fruit for a couple more decades.

Thank you for being you!

It’s high time that we language educators who are teaching for mastery, and working dang hard to learn the very best ways to do it, it’s time that we seize our power and build a fortress of unassailable data to defend this important shift in language assessment. Students’ portfolios, their collection of work samples over time in various contexts, are like fortresses that can prove that, miraculously, and quite conveniently for us and our level of happiness at work, the path of joy and communication and success really is the path to making good on the promise our administrators make every time they hand out their business card with that motto “Every Student Succeeds at Sylvan.”

Tell your principal that you are just trying to back them up on that promise if they question your grading. Tell your colleagues who are talking about you behind your back that you just got tired of failing kids. You can tell Page 82

yourself that they’re just talking cause they’re jealous, anyways. Who wouldn’t be? You have found the pot of gold. You have found the Pot of Goals.

With the right goals, the gold is there, shining right THERE, in your students’ innate ability to learn, if only the conditions are right. This book so far has been about the conditions for learning. Now, let’s turn to the nitty-gritty of how to sequence and plan our instruction and assessment so that we can amass that pile of unassailable data until it is so tall that we can use it to show, not just our World Language colleagues, but also the whole entire profession, what it means to teach the whole child in a way that they can all learn.

A note on terminology In our World Language courses, the term “proficiency-based grading” has caused some confusion in terms, because ACTFL uses the term “proficiency” in a specific way that other disciplines do not. Additionally, we have very broad standards and Can-Do statements that make it difficult to establish the specific criteria that we expect students to achieve.

It is important to note that “proficiency-based” grading does not mean that students’ grades are based on their proficiency level, according to the way we use that term in our ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain a student’s proficiency level in a typical classroom setting.

Proficiency means how students can perform in listening, reading, writing, and speaking in any context. If a student is truly proficient in speaking at a given level, let’s say Intermediate Mid, that means that in any Intermediate-appropriate context, that student can produce speech that consistently meets the targets for Intermediate Mid. The student who is proficient in speaking at the Intermediate Mid level can sustain that level of speech in a variety of contexts, both “practiced” contexts they have worked with in class and “unfamiliar” contexts that they have not “practiced.” You could ask the student who is proficient at the Intermediate Mid level of speaking to retell a story that they have “practiced” in class, and they would speak at the Intermediate Mid level. You could ask them to spontaneously tell a story about their own life, and they would, again, without preparation or practicing, produce Intermediate Mid speech. You could ask them to tell you about some content they have studied in class - let’s say you have studied school schedules in various German-speaking cultures - and they would speak at the Intermediate Mid level. You could ask them to spontaneously tell you about a topic they have not studied in your class, for example what people like to do in the summer, or popular social media platforms, and, once again, without rehearsal or preparation/study, they would speak in that context at the Intermediate Mid level. This is proficiency: the fluid, flexible ability to use the language at that level, regardless of context or specific topic.

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In our classrooms, on any given performance assessment, we are not able to ascertain students’ proficiency.

This is because the best we can generally do in a classroom setting is collect evidence of students’ performance in various contexts — how they perform in reading, listening, writing, and speaking on a given topic, using a given listening or speaking passage, within a certain context. This context might be highlyscaffolded, as in the case of a student whoo is writing with a list of sentence frames by their side, or with anchor charts and model texts available for their reference. Or the context might be much less-scaffolded, with no access to resources that were used in instruction.

Only by collecting and analyzing students’ performance across many contexts, with many topics, and with many kinds of listening and reading passages to interpret, can we infer with any degree of certainty their probable level of proficiency. That is why portfolios are such a powerful tool. They collect samples of performance in various contexts, and when students have been able to demonstrate a consistent pattern of work samples at a certain level, in a variety of contexts, and across multiple assessment events, we can more-confidently assert that they are likely to be proficient at that level.

Because students’ proficiency is such a complicated construct and difficult to pin down with any degree of certainty (since true proficiency can be sustained throughout so many contexts and we generally only have the classroom context in which to conduct our assessments), we need to base our “proficiency-based grading” or “standards-based grading” on students’ performance. This is what is done in other disciplines.

We World Language teachers just have the additional hitch in our giddy-up of disentangling the ACTFL term “proficiency” from the way the term is used in “proficiency-based grading.”

In ACTFL terms, it would be “performance-based grading,” because we are collecting performance samples that, over time, can serve as an indicator of the student’s probable proficiency level.

Consider how other disciplines measure student achievement in proficiency-based grading. In math class, students are not assessed on their overall “mathiness” or even their overall level of “numeracy” or “mathematical thinking” because it is impossible to measure such a broad construct with any given assessment task or tool. In English class, students are not assessed on their overall “readerliness” or “writerliness” or “literacy” but rather on their performance on specific, increasingly-complex listening, reading, writing, and speaking tasks that allow them to demonstrate their performance in executing the things that strong listeners, readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers do when interacting with increasingly-complex ideas and text types.

Thus, we can base our assessments on using portfolios to collect a variety of “snapshots” to capture how our students perform in reading, writing, listening, and speaking across various topics, using increasinglychallenging passages, and in less- and less-scaffolded contexts as they grow in their abilities and confidence.

Then, once we have collected a data set in their portfolios that demonstrates sustained performance in many contexts, with many topics, and with various text types, including culturally-authentic and “unpracticed” (or “unfamiliar”) listening and reading passages that were created for their proficient grade-level peers who are receiving their education in the L2, then we can begin to say with more clarity that their proficiency is likely to be at a certain level — the level of performance that they have been able to sustain across these multiple contexts.

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We can engineer these contexts to move from highly-scaffolded to less-scaffolded and more-challenging, as students grow in skill and confidence. A worthy goal is to design our assessment tasks to so that students can begin, even in the first semester, to perform at an Intermediate Mid or even an Intermediate High level in interpretive listening and reading, and an Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid level in presentational and interpersonal writing and speaking. Then, we can gradually increase the difficulty of the passages we ask them to interpret, and the topics about which we ask them to speak, and we can gradually remove the scaffolds to which they have access during the performance assessment, so that they can sustain a satisfying, meaningful level of communication even as the context becomes more challenging. Even first-year students can perform at an Intermediate level when reading, listening to, or writing and speaking about, a “familiar” or “practiced” topic and texts.

It is important that first-year teachers, or teachers whose upper-level students have not benefitted from previous communicative, standards-aligned instruction in prior years, design the contexts for student performance so that students can perform at an Intermediate level on the majority of assessment tasks. For example, in the first assessments, teachers might ask students to read passages that the class has written or read together prior to the assessment. Most students will be able to perform at the Intermediate level on such a task. Setting up tasks and situations in which they can only perform at the Novice level, even the Novice High level, is frustrating and, honestly, can feel quite humiliating to students.

For example, if we gave our first-year students an unfamiliar passage from a culturally-authentic news magazine, written for adult readers who are already proficient in the language, about a topic that we have not “practiced” or worked with in class, they would most likely only be able to pick out isolated word, phrases, and, if they were lucky, a sentence or two here and there. That’s not very motivating! It feels like an exercise in frustration. It is disheartening for many students. Why do that, when instead we can give them contexts in which they can, so fast, at seemingly-lightening speed, perform at the sentence and even the small paragraph level? We can bring them “challenge” readings, too, so that students can test themselves in more-challenging contexts. But it is my strong recommendation that the bulk of the assessment contexts be designed so that students can experience a satisfying level of performance from the very first assessments, and this book is designed to lead you through learning how to do just that.

Formative Assessments and Daily Grades The Daily Instructional Framework is designed to allow you to collect informal observation data throughout the lesson, as you interact with students in the course language each day. There are two components of the framework that are specificallydesigned to provide opportunities for formative assessment, either through observing students’ performance during class activities, or by having students produce written work to demonstrate their performance, which we can collect and score for daily grades. These two components are Scaffolded Oral Review and Student Application and Assessment.

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Scaffolded Oral Review, which comes right after the “heart” of the lesson, Guided Oral Input, is a short (about three or four minutes) oral review of the content that was created in the previous segment of the lesson, usually conducted through a series of questions and/or a recap, often re-using a visual aid that was created or used during the Guided Oral Input (such as student-created artwork, the calendar, the input chart, or the image(s) from a Picture Talk or Picture Walk or still screens from the Movie Talk). It is an opportunity to check for understanding and get some repetitions of the language and ideas presented in Guided Oral Input.

Your Scaffolded Oral Review time can be shortened or lengthened depending on your schedule. For Block classes, you might use two or three different Scaffolded Oral Review strategies in one lesson, to incorporate variety and more “hands-on” or interactive strategies into the longer class period. Some examples of tried and true, simple, low-prep “Go-To” Scaffolded Oral Review strategies are: Whole-Class Questions and Answers, Kid Grid, Finish My Sentence, Review Artists’ Work, Reading the Walls, Word Card Review Game, Thought Bubble Review Game, Video Retells, Five-Finger Review Chart, or any other review strategy.

Student Application and Assessment is the closing or “exit ticket” at the end of the lesson. It, too, can be shortened or lengthened depending on scheduling constraints. There are many possibilities for students to apply and use the language and content from the day’s lesson. My go-to strategies here, that I can use about 75% of the time and not get tired of them, are the Quick Quiz and the Question and Answer Game. The Q and A Game can be used with the Play That Word and Say It Twice modifications thrown in here and there for variety. Quick Quizzes can be either oral review, with whole-class answers, or written, so that you can enter a daily grade. The Q and A Game can be played with the appropriate version of the “game board” found in the Appendices, or with partners simply counting the number of words that their partner says. Another strategy that I like here is Listen and Sketch or Read and Sketch.

This is another part of the daily framework that can be stretched out for block classes, because it is comprised of more active instructional strategies that have students using the language with which they have interacted, beginning with Guided Oral Input, that day. You might want to add in more active strategies like Everyone Acts or Running Dictation, if you have block class periods. But you can get quite far with the very simple, lowprep strategies of Quick Quizzes, various versions of the Q and A Game, and Listen and Sketch. If you have more time than anticipated, you can easily fill it with meaningful language review by adding questions to the quiz or game, or have everyone switch partners and play the game some more.

Other Student Application and Assessment strategies that we will cover in this book are Write Inside the Story, Finish My Sentence, Everyone Acts, Quick Writes, L1 (English for me) Summaries, and Learning Logs.

Learning Logs are particularly useful in Block classes because they offer students choices in how to represent their learning from the day, and you can make them part of your closing routine, setting aside the last ten minutes or so of the block period to have students add another page to their Learning Logs each day, as a differentiated closure/processing activity.

Summative Assessments These assessments are administered every six weeks (or in an interval that corresponds to your academic calendar). They are collected in student portfolios to document growth over the course of the year.

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Setting Daily Student Learning Objectives To set daily learning objectives, we want to consider both language and content/process goals and objectives for the lesson.

Teachers in all disciplines want our students to develop their language abilities (for example, to learn subjectmatter vocabulary such as science terms) as well as to learn content and processes that are important to the discipline. However, there is a major difference between subject-matter classrooms and our language acquisition classrooms. In subject-matter classrooms, for instance Chemistry, teachers have two pre-selected goals. There is (1) a language goal, ensuring that students are understanding the language and learning Chemistry-related vocabulary, and (2) content/process goals, learning the facts of Chemistry or the process of conducting an experiment or writing up a lab report, etc.

In a World Language classroom, we also have two kinds of goals: (1) that students understand the language as well as (2) the actual facts, content, or processes of the class. The difference is that, for us, at the beginner level, and even at the intermediate level, the “facts of the class” are not specified by our standards, as in the case of the Chemistry or Social Studies, in which the standards generally require students to retain certain facts, such as the structure of the Periodic Table or the various social roles under the feudal system.

Our ACTFL standards do not specify specific content. Some states or districts have developed standards and/or pacing guides that do specify specific topics or themes, but even these documents are generally far less specific and contain far fewer facts or content to impart to students.

If you do, for whatever reason, need to impart certain specific content, you will find recommendations for how to integrate that content into the Stepping Stones cycles and phases in the Appendices entitled “Angling Guided Oral Input to Elicit Language Features” and “Language Study/Writing Focus Days.”

For most of us, the specific content is not given to us by our standards documents, so - especially for firstyear students, the specifics of the content is determined by the teacher, and sometimes arises from the direction the class’s interests lead the discussion. So, instead of how to read the periodic table, we teach our students about each other -- what their classmates like, dislike, what they do each day, what kind of people they are, what kinds of imagination they have.

When the objective is to learn personal information, we cannot know what specific words or topics will arise in class as we plan and map out our objectives. We thus need content objectives that are flexible and responsive enough to allow the class to take the lead on the trajectory of the discussion that day.

Thus, any Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) that we write for our lessons will have two components: a language/literacy component and a content/process component. I will be using the following template or formula to state the daily learning objectives in this book, which guides us to include both language/literacy and content/process objectives in each lesson:

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By the end of class, you will be able to ___ to ___ about ___.

What goes in the blanks?

“By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

We will look at each of the three elements in the blanks in this objective “frame,” in the sections below.

Do Something in the Language The “do something in the language” is what students will do in the Student Application and Assessment strategy that you will use at the end of class. For instance, if you plan to lead the class in the Q and A Game that day, you would choose an objective that involves speaking (see the examples below). If you planned to have students Listen and Sketch to demonstrate comprehension as you retell the day’s content, you would choose an objective that involves listening (see the examples below).

The “do something in the language” is, of course, going to change, depending on the level of performance that your students are capable of. It might look something like this, in various levels: For beginners: (a) say words in French (b) write words in French (c) read sentences in French (d) listen to sentences in French For more-advanced beginners: (a) say phrases in French (b) write phrases in French (c) read a short paragraph in French (d) listen to a paragraph in French For intermediate students: (a) say sentences in French (b) write sentence in French (c) read a (multiparagraph) passage in French (d) listen to a (multi-paragraph) passage in French For more-advanced intermediate students: (a) say strings of connected sentences in French (b) write strings of connected sentences in French (c) read a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic (d) listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar, multiparagraph) video in French that gives more information on the lesson topic For advanced students: (a) say paragraphs in French (b) write paragraphs in French (c) read a (culturallyauthentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic (d) listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic Execute a Language Function Let’s move on to the second component of the lesson objective, “By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

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The objective for “executing a language function” depends upon the cycle and phase of the Stepping Stones curricular framework you are currently working with. The cycles and phases are built around language functions, so each phase will have a ready-made baseline language function for you to use.

For Cycle One, Phase One, Describing Setting, it might be something like this: For beginners: to use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) For intermediate students: use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) and compare and contrast For advanced students: use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) to describe in the past, present, and future For Cycle Two, Phase One, Narrating Personal Stories, it might be something like this: For beginners: to retell the events in a story For intermediate students: to retell the events and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying For advanced students: to retell the events and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, and use a “narrator’s voice” to show why this was an important, memorable, or interesting experience.

About a Topic/Theme Let’s move on to the final component of the lesson objective, “By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

The “topic/theme” depends, of course, on the specific content that you will present and discuss in that day’s lesson. For Cycle One, Phase One, Describing Setting, in the lesson on Small Talk (calendar and weather) it might be something like this: For beginners: to describe the weather today For intermediate students: to describe the weather here and compare it with the weather in various places in the francophone world For advanced students: to describe the weather today and yesterday, and predict what the weather will be like this weekend, in various locations here and in the francophone world Sometimes the “topic” is the same for all levels, and the only parts of the objective that change are the “do something” and “language function.” For example, in Cycle Two, Phase One, Narrating Personal Stories, in the lesson on, all of the levels will be discussing the stories of good and bad trips, so the “topic” might be something like this, for all levels: For beginners: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken For intermediate students: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken For advanced students: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken

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Examples of completed learning objectives In the example from Cycle One Phase One (Describing Setting): Beginners: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a paragraph in French and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) in a description of the weather today.

Intermediate students: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar, multi-paragraph) video in French that gives more information on the weather in the French Antilles and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) that you hear.

Advanced students: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multiparagraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives the weather predictions for this weekend and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) that you hear.

In the example from Cycle Two Phase One (Narrating Personal Stories): Beginners: By the end of class, you will be able to say words in French to retell the events in a story about a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken.

Intermediate students: By the end of class, you will be able to say strings of connected sentences in French to retell the events, and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, in a story about a good or bad trip Advanced students: By the end of class, you will be able to say paragraphs in French to retell the events, tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, and use a “narrator’s voice” to show why this was an important, memorable, or interesting experience, in a story about a good or bad trip As Oprah says here, the goal is to equip ALL students with the ability to express and interpret meaningful communication in the course language. With our assessments, we have the power to communicate this truth to them. They can ALL do it. What a tremendous gift to our students: a new language and a new self-concept as a capable, successful language learner and global citizen!

In Part Two of this book, you will find detailed examples of learning objectives that align to the strategies and content in the cycles and phases in the “Foundational” sequence of cycles and phases (introduced in Chapter Five) as outlined with dark squares below.

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Part Two: The Cycles of Instruction and Assessment Welcome to Part Two of this book! This section comprises the meat and potatoes, day-by-day, session-bysession guide to the school year. So far I’ve talked about the foundational ideas upon which I have based the upcoming section, in which we find the main content, the mojo, of this book. This part will lead you through 31 instructional sessions, four End-of-the-Year projects and celebrations, and three summative portfolio assessment sessions (in the Appendices), aligned to the three cycles in the “Foundations” instructional sequence.

In these sessions, you will find the practical steps to make these ideas come to life in your classroom every day. In the first part of this book, I have given a brief overview of the Guided Oral Input strategies and some of the activities that extend and reinforce the language and content that you will present during the Guided Oral Input portion of the daily lesson framework. I will now present to you - in much, much greater depth how to implement those activities, one after the other, to build a year of instruction.

The year is organized into three cycles that each last about six to eight weeks. Each cycle comprises five to seven weeks of instruction, followed by portfolio assessments that take about a week (two to three block classes or four to five shorter classes) that closely aligns to the instruction conducted during the preceding weeks. For example, in Cycle One, Description, your portfolio assessments will ask students to read and listen to descriptions, and write (and perhaps also speak) to give descriptions.

In the following sessions, we will work through each cycle, and the selected instructional strategies that I have chosen for you, and then after the sessions on that cycle, you will find an assessment session in the Appendices that provides you with materials you could use or adapt for the portfolio for the cycle.

I am so pleased to be able to share with you my recipe for a fun-filled, language-filled year, and help you ease your way into Stepping Stones, which is truly a groundbreaking approach to structuring a language course.

I certainly hope that you enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed developing and writing about it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the trust you have invested in me, and in my guidance this year.

It’s now time to get the show on the road. Buckle up, and let’s go!

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Chapter 7: Beginning the Year Teachers, welcome to the year! This is the beginning of a new start for you. Whereas in the past, you might have struggled, as I did and as so many of your peers do, with how to make sense of the vast array of ideas and strategies making their way around the internet and conferences, you will now have a framework to guide you step by step through this first foray into Stepping Stones, so you can take a long break from chasing down new ideas, or working to form them into a cohesive learning pathway, and simply devote your energy to getting good at the foundation.

It is so exciting to share this foundation with you, because, as I explained above, once you have invested the time and effort into understanding the yearlong framework, the daily instructional framework, and the portfolio assessment system and measurement tools, you will forevermore have a guidance system and a way to easily fit new ideas and strategies, and new topics and resources, into a strong yet flexible curricular framework that can serve as your GPS (Global Positioning System) every year, in every class, at every level, from here on out.

This is the start of a new era for you as a language teacher! It is so fortuitous that you have chosen to use this book as your training program this year. I do not take my responsibility to you lightly. I intend to lead you step by step as we work through the year together. Thank you for joining me. It truly means the world to me that my fellow educators find value in what I have been developing and refining for the last 19 years as I have made my way through my career as a language and literacy educator, and an avid student of pedagogy, methods, and materials.

Once upon a time, in 2015, I was in the midst of completing my application to a doctoral program at the University of Oregon, because I felt a restless calling that was becoming more and more insistent, to work with teachers, develop curriculum, and attempt to find workable solutions to questions and roadblocks that seem to get in so many teachers’ way as they transition to standards-based, communicative language teaching, and especially when they are working to effect building-wide or district-wide change, without strong frameworks and materials to train their colleagues, or even to use as a starting point for making the often-nebulous concept of “communicative language teaching” tangible, “explainable,” and doable for departments that might not always agree on every specific element of what makes a strong lesson, unit, course, or program.

But, right in the middle of the application process, which I thought would make me into a teacher trainer with my Bona Fides, life came knocking, and I just went ahead and started teaching other teachers all the things I could, without the official OK from the Powers That Be. It’s all good; what it means is that instead of going off to school again, I stayed in my classroom, and worked out the system that you now hold in your hands. It, to me, is more valuable than a doctorate. Besides, I very highly doubt that I would have been able to work all

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this out if I had been busy all these years doing other people’s projects and writing papers that weren’t meant to go directly into teachers’ hands. Better like this. Cheaper, too.

The General Trajectory of the Term Stepping Stones is designed as a spiral curriculum. This means that the cycles of instruction, based on various “genres” or “language functions” (e.g. Description, Narration, Information) build upon each other through the term.

The cycles are also designed to spiral back to the same language functions year after year. After all, how can one truly say that they have “arrived” as a writer of description, or as a reader of information? It’s just not possible. Even professional writers are still learning, growing, and developing in their ability to write to describe or to teach/inform. For this reason, because there is no “end goal” in the development of morecapable, more-confident, and more-powerful writers, readers, and communicators, the cycles are designed to be used year after year, with different content and language/literacy objectives, and with increasingly-complex discourse within the genres The complete Stepping Stones curricular framework contains six cycles: (1) Description, (2) Narration, (3) Going Deeper with Narration, (4) Information, (5) Opinion, and (6) Argument. In each cycle, there are four phases of instruction, but in this foundational book, we will not use every phase. Should you want to tackle the entire Stepping Stones yearlong framework, after you have used this abbreviated “on ramp” foundational book, you can check out the complete framework in the book Stepping Stones.

For now, I truly think you have made the right choice. You are starting your journey with a new approach with this Foundations book, which will take you by the hand and lead you to understand through doing. As you implement the sessions, you will develop a very real and concrete understanding of the structures, strategies, tools, materials, and practices that are essential to successfully implementing this approach.

We will begin with Cycle One, Description. We will work with all four phases of the Description cycle: Describing Settings, Describing Preferences, Describing People Inside and Out, and then Describing in the Past and Present. When we arrive at the end of the sessions in this cycle, we will use the Description rubrics, the Description writing continuum, and perhaps the appropriate Speaking Rubric to help students self-assess their performance in interpreting and producing descriptions.

Then, we move on to Cycle Two, Narration. We will work with three phases of the Narration cycle: Narrating Personal Stories, Narrating Imaginative/Literary Stories, and Narrating Cultural Stories. You might well deduce that, as mentioned above, the spiral nature of Stepping Stones will carry forward the language and literacy from Cycle One, Description, into Cycle Two, Narration. When we tell stories, of course we need to describe the setting, and the character’s physical and internal traits and preferences, and we will be describing in the past and perhaps the present, too. So you can already see how the curricular framework is built to spiral back to and reinforce prior learning. Again, at the end of this cycle, after several weeks of Page 93

narrating these various kinds of stories, we will use the narration-specific measurement tools in the summative portfolio assessments.

In this book, we will not work with Cycle Three, Going Deeper with Narration. It is outlined in detail in Stepping Stones, but if you work through Cycle Two in this book, then if you later decide that you want to go deeper, you will find that the strategies, skills, and understandings that you developed as you worked through Cycle Two will be very helpful in implementing Cycle Three.

Next, we move on to Cycle Four, Information. We will work with two phases in the Information cycle: Organizing an Informational Paragraph and Teaching Topic-Specific Vocabulary. Again, we will use the Information-specific assessment tools at the end of this abbreviated Information cycle.

In this foundational book, we will not address Cycle Five, Opinion, or Cycle Six, Argument. These cycles are outlined in Stepping Stones as well, and, again, working through the selected cycles in this book will be invaluable should you choose to incorporate these cycles into your course in future terms.

Finally, to end the term, if you have time, or anytime during your course that you feel your students are ready for a more hands-on, project-based learning experience, you might implement one or more of the End-of-theYear project options in which students use the language to create artifacts and preserve their creativity for the future: Class Yearbooks, the Story Books Project, the Festival of Worksheets, and/or the Word-Off. The First Six Weeks - A Special Time The first six weeks are an especially exciting time in the classroom. You will be norming the group, igniting your students’ creativity, and cultivating group bonds. You will be building a platform for your teaching this year to get real liftoff. You will be working on your delivery skills, one activity at the time, with this book open on your desk, guiding you step by step, on a recognizable trajectory to becoming your best teaching self.

This is the part of the year that will demonstrate the power of comprehensible input to your students, that will teach them how it works, that will build their confidence while establishing a positive and focused classroom culture, and send their brand-new language proficiency zooming up the chart. The activities are sequenced to make students feel successful, engaged, and part of a community. By learning these skills and strategies, you will be able to start speaking to your classes comprehensibly, even your beginners, or students who have not had communicative language courses in the past, and you will be able to speak in full sentences, about topics that are of interest to them, right from day one of class.

Even if you are working in a building with strict expectations around your teaching grammar, and you are not able to teach exclusively with proficiency-based strategies all year long, I urge you to at begin the year with 100% language use, just communicating in the language in a comprehensible and engaging way, if at all possible. Grammar lessons are best put off until later in the year. Any discrete grammar instruction is always Page 94

easier grasped when the students have first been given a rich bed of comprehensible input on which to base their conscious language study.

During the first weeks of school, all classrooms - science, math, band, and PE - are working on norming the classroom, building community, and inculcating in their students a love of the subject matter. An observer who pops into a proficiency-based lesson at the beginning of the year may even start to shift their mindset about what is possible in language teaching, once they observe first-year students happily participating in a discussion or activity in a language that students only began to study this very month. I recommend fully immersing your classes in comprehensible language interactions, for at least the first six-week unit, if at all possible. If you do this, you will see something remarkable, almost miraculous.

Students need to understand why listening is the focus of the first six weeks. So it is recommended that we take one day to provide them with a basic understanding of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This metacognitive orientation is suggested on the last day of the first week of school, or about three to four days into the year, after a few days of acquisition-focused communication activities.

CI is unparalleled in building community, trust, and love of the language during the first month of the school year. It just so happens that So in that sense, the activities in the Description cycle deeply support our instruction for the rest of the year. This cycle builds a foundation of goodwill and feelings of success that support students’ growth for the remaining cycles of the year. In doing so, it develops the students’ ear for the language, while building listening and reading confidence to prepare students for later independent reading.

A Note on How to Schedule the Instructional Sessions The instructional sessions of this book were written to guide you through the year. However, you will notice that there are not 180 instructional sessions; there are 31 total, plus four End-of-the-Year options. Each “session” walks you through a different Guided Oral Input strategy. Guided Oral Input is the third part of the daily lesson framework and the component that changes the most from day to day.

Before the Guided Oral Input, we have a short Reading Workshop. For many teachers, for most of the year this is free-choice reading time, usually beginning in late September or October for students who have already had a year or two of literacy-focused instruction in the course language, or in late November, December, or January, for students in their first year of this kind of language class. However, in the beginning of the year, first-year classes or those new to comprehension-based instruction will not be ready to begin free-choice reading during the Reading Workshop time.

For that reason, and because some teachers will not have yet collected enough texts to begin a free-choice reading program, each session in this book gives Reading Workshop strategies that can be used with a whole-class text, in lieu of (or, especially for block classes, in addition to) free-choice reading.

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If you have a sufficient collection of classroom library books or other reading material, you will want to start free-choice reading when students are ready. For my students, that is usually around Thanksgiving of the first year (so, after about three months of class) and at the end of September (after about four weeks of class) for my returning students who, for the most part, have previously had plenty of reading and communicative language teaching with me in their first year. So, after instructional session 15 and the first portfolio assessments, you will read strategies for launching free-choice reading, and then after that, you might use most of the daily Reading Workshop time to lead free-choice reading.

As noted above, the “heart” of the lesson is #3, Guided Oral Input, so that is the longest part of the average instructional sessions.

After the Guided Oral Input, the remaining lesson components are basically comprised of various ways to continue using the language and information in different formats.

In the interest of simplicity, it is best for you, to lighten your planning workload, if you have a repertoire of about four to six options that you can re-use for the various lesson components. For that reason, you will find that as you work through the instructional sessions, the later sessions do not include very many new strategies for these lesson components. Rather, they simply direct you to re-use a strategy that you already learned and used in a previous session, perhaps with a modification to deepen the strategy or to better align it with the phase of that particular session. You will be directed to refer back to the page(s) of the book to go back to the previous session in which the strategy was first introduced and explained, so you can refresh your memory if need be, when planning the strategy again.

The first four sessions are written day by day, so that you can get a very solid mental picture of what those first three lessons will feel like, as you plan and prep.

The fourth session is special. It is an introduction to second language acquisition and an overview of how things go in a class like this. It is conducted in the class’s shared stronger language and is scheduled for approximately the fourth day of school, after the students have had a chance to experience a few days of instruction conducted in the course language. After completing the first four sessions, you might feel the need to move on, or you might continue working with the activities in the first three sessions for a while longer, before moving on to the fifth instructional session.

Once the fifth session starts, the rest of the sessions are not laid out day by day. You will most likely spend two to three days (or even more) in each session, either returning to the same content that you introduced in the first lesson using that strategy, or presenting new content that fits with what you taught in the first lesson.

When you are sketching out the general schedule for the year, you might want to use the following pages to help you picture the strategies and content that you might cover, and when. I call them “bubble sheets” because the first time I shared these with the CI Liftoff Facebook group, that’s what Cyndi, a group member, said they looked like.

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There are three versions of these “bubble sheets” schedules provided for each phase: (1) for classes of about 55 minutes that meet three to five times per week (2) for year-long block classes of about 80 minutes that meet every other day (3) for 4x4 block classes that meet every day, for only half the year.

Please note that the lesson objectives on these “bubble sheets" will be for Beginners. In the instructional session, you will find suggested performance objectives for Intermediate and Advanced students.

Further, on the “bubble sheets” you may notice that in the learning objective it says “L” for “Language.” You would want to replace the L with the name of the language you teach.

In the instructional sessions, it says French, just because that is the language that I have taught the most, et elle me tient très à coeur ❤ .

Well, enough dithering, dilly-dallying, and delay. Time to jump in to the rest of your career! The water is great! Time for liftoff!

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Instructional Session 1

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner: answer questions with one or more words - in French! - about the weather and date.

Intermediate: answer questions with sentences in French about the weather and date.

Advanced: answer questions with strings of sentences in French, to describe the weather today and the activities that people in class are doing.

Notes on Norming the Class: On the first day of class, especially for classes for whom this is their first year with you, this part of class is going to take way, way longer than most any other day of the year. On the first day of class, you might have a lot going on. If so, you might only say TWO or THREE sentences during the Guided Oral Input. Considering how often you will most likely be walking over to the rules and executing Plan A of the classroom management moves discussed in Chapter Four, and how long it will probably take to norm the class today, maybe even three sentences of actual Guided Oral Input is a stretch.

In the first days of class, and, in fact, all year, your goal is not only to give students a whole bunch of Guided Oral Input, but rather to provide just enough input time so that you can process the new language and information by proceeding to the other components of the Daily Instructional Framework that come after Guided Oral Input (Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment). In the first few lessons, since you will be setting up the routines and procedures for the entire year, you will not be providing much actual content during the class discussions in Guided Oral Input.

It will be easiest for you if you actually think through the following lesson word by word, picturing yourself teaching it in your actual classroom space, and really get comfortable with the concept that you will only be imparting a couple of new sentences in this lesson. This technique of mentally walking through a visualization of your future performance is often used by athletes, public speakers, and performers, to rehearse and prepare for a successful execution of the game plan or script.

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Perhaps it will help to set your mind at ease, if doubts creep in as you are visualizing the lesson, and you begin to question if it is “worth it” to invest so much time in preparing for a lesson in which you “only” teach a

couple of new concepts, to think about the very important information that you are imparting, through the structure of the lesson and the manner in which you deliver the instruction.

(1) You are speaking slowly and carefully, using pauses for processing time and so you can calmly walk to a visual aid and use it to clearly and unequivocally indicate the meaning of what you are saying. This demonstrates in a tangible way to students that, indeed, Rule #1 is, in fact, the prime objective.

Understanding is key, and you will show students, through your calm, slow, uncluttered speech, that you will make it very possible for them to actually implement that rule each minute of class. You are setting students at ease, lowering their affective filter, and helping to create the optimal conditions for language acquisition.

(2) You are conducting class in an unhurried yet structured manner, not rushing to “cover” a significant amount of new information, but rather perfectly prepared to only impart a couple of new sentences in Guided Oral Input. With the manner and structure of class as your primary goals, you can free your thinking mind to be present to the class’s attention, and to any slight distractions that might arise during the lesson. With your conscious mind attuned to the goal of noticing the faintest whisper of a side conversation or the beginning Page 99

indication that someone is about to start rooting around in their binder for their schedule when they should be listening and watching the lesson, you will be much more ready to interrupt your instruction and walk to the rules.

Thus, you will demonstrate to the class how serious you are about cultivating a focused, calm, attentive atmosphere during the times when you are communicating in the language. Since you will be communicating in the language a lot this year, your efforts in this area right now, at the very beginning, are a very important investment in the success of every lesson, all year, and, indeed, of this entire instructional approach. So this broader learning (that you will interrupt each and every little distraction) is much more important, especially in the first lessons, than any content or specific facts you will impart.

(3) You are demonstrating the daily framework to students, and actually completing it even though you might well actually be working with one or two sentences from the Guided Oral Input. This is fine, and even desirable, because it allows you to take a very simple, very short amount of language from the Guided Oral Input and process it using the lesson framework that comes after Guided Oral Input (Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment), which demonstrates to the class how the lessons will go each year.

It is of the utmost importance that you move quickly and with intention through a complete lesson framework, with very short, simple, and straightforward individual components. For example, your Shared Writing might be only one sentence in these first few lessons. That’s fine, as long as students have the experience of doing some Shared Writing, no matter how short or simple, in the first few lessons, they will come to expect that it will happen every day. The first few lessons are very important in establishing students’ expectations of “what’s normal” in your class and “how things are done” in Latin class this year. Of course, your goal is to cover more information in your lessons than just one sentence. But without going slowly here at the beginning, and clearly and consistently demonstrating how the daily lessons go, you will, in all likelihood, not truly experience the power of the Stepping Stones daily lesson framework this year, because you will be constantly trying to establish the Daily Instructional Framework as the “standard operating procedure.”

Whatever you do in the first few lessons, and especially in the first lesson, will imprint on students’ minds in a special way, and become the standard operating procedure for “how we do class here.” So, please, when preparing and thinking through these first few lessons, give a good deal of thought to how you will feel delivering such small doses of new language and information in the Guided Oral Input part of the lessons, so that you do not second-guess yourself in class, wondering if you are “covering enough” or “teaching enough.”

These first few lessons are mainly about teaching routines, procedures, and expectations. THAT is enough.

It is an investment. You will live off the interest all year, and throughout all the years that you teach these students in the future.

You might very well find that you live off the interest for the rest of your teaching career, because you will forever after have a strong daily lesson structure, and you will find yourself implementing it with less and less planning, and with more and more confidence, until you, one day, in a year or two, look back on these first few lessons when you first established the Daily Instructional Framework as a real turning point in your development as a communicative language teacher.

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That’s most assuredly the way I feel when I look back on the first lessons I taught with the instructional frameworks I learned from Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. At first, it felt clunky, like using someone else’s words and trying to be someone else. To say that I was “using someone else’s words” might well be the understatement of the millennium. I was literally teaching from Lucy’s books, reading right off the page as I taught. I was telling “personal stories” that I had cribbed from Maggie Beatty, my TCRWP trainer from Summer Institutes, and pretending that they were my own stories.

But after the awkwardness of those first lessons, I gradually put the books aside, and began to develop and tell my own stories, and find my own voice as a workshop teacher, until I can now plan and teach using the TCRWP frameworks and materials, on my own, without even a planbook to guide me. That is the power of an instructional framework — it allowed me to outgrow the scaffolding that Lucy Calkins and her team provided, and learn to build my own lessons with my own voice, using their structure.

Now we will turn to the lesson procedures.

Having greeted the students in English, checked to make sure everyone is in the right room, introduced

yourself, explained where to put their things, etc., explain to them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and that this is the best way for them to learn! Tell them that the first activity you will be doing is reading and then you will discuss the calendar and weather. Then get right to it in that first class, even if it is only a few minutes long. While all their other teachers lecture them on the first day, you will begin instructing them using the language as quickly as possible.

Tell the students that they simply need to sit back, understand the general messages in class, not every word, and that your job is to make sure they do not get lost. Tell them that you will not call on them individually to speak in class until they are ready, later in the year, so all they need to do right now is sit back and listen.

Remind the students that they will spend most of their time in class hearing the language and using it, and that you are about to begin a portion of the lesson in which everyone will work together to keep the class speaking in the language.

Tell the class that you will begin with a short Reading Workshop, and read a short text together about school schedules, and then you will have a discussion of the calendar in French. You can also share the objective with them (see the list provided for examples).

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Find That Cognate Project or distribute paper copies of a short text that has many cognates. You can download these texts from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) or create your own. When preparing your own text for the Find That Cognate strategy, it is best to think of a category of words that naturally contains a lot of cognates. For Italian Example

German Example

instance, these examples use the cognate-heavy categories of school subjects and sports.

The following Reading Workshop texts use the cognate-heavy topic of animals, with varying degrees of difficulty for various levels of classes. Of course, here in the very first lesson, you are strongly cautioned not to choose texts that are intimidating, even with your upper-level classes. That’s why there is only one level of the “school subjects” texts which were designed to be used during the first days of school. They only have one level, because I wanted all classes to have a strong, confident start in Reading Workshop.

I strongly recommend that leveled texts, like the examples above, be used only after at least three days of super-easy, one-level-fits-all texts. And, if your upper-level students are intimidated by the Advanced text, or even the Intermediate text, you can simply drop down to the lower-level texts so that they can get strong and confident. (You can always return to the more-challenging version of the text with your upper-level classes later, in a future Reading Workshop, and “stretch” them by revisiting the same topic and text layout, but the more challenging Intermediate or Advanced level text).

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For now, I suggest using very simple texts, such as the examples below.

German Beginner Cognate Reading

German Intermediate Cognate Reading

German Advanced Cognate Reading

You might conduct class in this way, if you are using the cognate reading below, in French. Please note that the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use this standard black text. The words that are said in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me and many teachers in the US) are written in this color.

You may notice that there is a lot of English in these first lessons. Again, it is an investment. You are setting up not only your classroom expectations, but also a framework, so you will not need to continually re-explain how class goes each day. You will save a lot of time that is, for many teachers, spent in English, throughout the year, setting up new activities and instructional frameworks. You will not need to do that, because you will follow the same basic lesson framework almost every day. Please do not balk at the amount of English you are investing in the setup here at the beginning of the year. It will come back to you, with plenty of interest!

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Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed:

“Let’s read this school schedule. Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates. Cognates are words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

“We need a “French time” signal so we all know that it is time to transition to heavy-duty French listening.”

“What do you guys think would be a good signal? We need the signal to have a visual component - some kind of gesture that everyone can see - and also something that we can hear, like a phrase or a sound.”

(Take ideas, and perhaps vote.)

“That is a great signal. Shawn, nice job!”

(The student whose idea was the winning signal is generally the most willing to take the job, so you will use the “Positive Preemptive Peer Pressure strategy to encourage them to agree to the position, as described below.)

“Class, clap for Shawn!” (You beam at Shawn as if they are the most wonderful student in the history of school.). No, no, clap ENTHUSIASTICALLY! Shawn, do you want to be our Class Starter?”

(Usually, Shawn will say yes. If not, ask them whom they would like to nominate. Then have everyone clap for that person, to preemptively peer pressure them a bit. If that person does not want the job, you might have them nominate a third person, or you might just say that you will start class, but you will just give the teacher signal, and use some signal that you like, unless someone in class wants to change it.)

“OK, we will read this text and talk about the words we see, and then we will talk about the calendar. I will talk in French and your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand French, by pointing and talking slowly and clearly. Shawn, let’s go!”

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(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

“List of Classes. School year 2020-2021. Hour. First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth. First hour: Physical Education. Second hour: Algebra, etc.”

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘list’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, list in English, is list. L-I-S-T. List.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, liste en anglais est list. ell-eeyy-ess-tayy (saying letters in French). Liste.”)

(Moving on to another cognate,) “Class, ‘courses' in English? Yes, courses in English, is courses (or classes). C-O-U-R-S-E-S/ C-L-A-S-S-E-S.” (Asking a more open-ended question — you might skip this in beginner classes) “Class, look. (gesture “look.”) “Look means look (gesture). Show me look. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “Classe, regardez (gesture). ‘Regardez’ (gesture) means ‘look’. (gesture). Show me ‘regardez’ (gesture).”)

(Note on management of these gestures: You may need to “park” yourself here to make sure that everyone is showing you their comprehension by gesturing with you, even if their gestures are not very energetic or dramatic. You will simply repeat if needed, “Show me ‘regardez’” until the entire class is gesturing, even just a little bit.)

Today in these first moments of class it is of supreme importance that the entire class comply with your first request. When you use the gestures in your own speech, it is not important that the entire class also use the gesture, though some students just naturally will gesture along. However, when you are introducing or reviewing the gestures, and you say, “Show me,” you will want to maintain the expectation that everyone gesture together, to focus their attention on associating the gesture, the sound, and the meaning.

You do not need to go into a long-winded explanation here, or plead to the class. In fact, the less said the better. You will exert a stronger “presence” as a leader in class if you simply repeat “Show me regardez” as you gesture, and give the class as a whole an expectant look as if to say, without speaking, “you all need to do this.”

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If some students still do not comply, simply repeat again, “Show me ‘regardez.’” If, at this point, there are a few holdouts, you will probably want to do some “selective not noticing,” and make like you think everyone has complied. You can take mental note of those students, and plan to move a little closer to them next time you ask the class to gesture with you, to see if a little more proximity will nudge them into participating.

If that is not successful, you should still continue on and not get into a power struggle, and just plan to have a follow-up conversation with them in which you explain that they can just make the slightest of gestures to show their comprehension, but that you will be asking them to get their hands involved because it is good for their vocabulary.

(Moving on, speaking in the course language and getting back to the sentence that prompted the gesturing,) “Class, look (gesture). Other cognates?”

(Note: Point to the word “Cognates” in the text, or write it on the board, and then point around on the text, to indicate nonverbally that you want the class to give you more English cognates.)

“Can you read any other words?”

(Getting back into the language, and repeating the same words that you just used in that little English aside,) “Class, look (gesture). Other cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, algebra in English, is algebra. A-L-G-E-B-R-A.” Reading Workshop only lasts about 6 to 8 minutes on a normal day, and this is a very not-normal day, so you might very well only look for two or three cognates before moving on. Another note is that you do not need to worry about how to “tie” the content of the Reading Workshop into the rest of the lesson; the content of Reading Workshop is, mostly, not tied to the lesson. Rather, it is a “warm-up” time to spend working with comprehensible texts, to give students comprehensible input in written form as they read and in aural form as they listen to you read and discuss the text. So, after a few minutes, you will want to move into the Guided Oral Input, the calendar discussion.

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Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) You will begin with a blank calendar, just a piece of chart paper with a blank grid on which you will create the current month, as pictured below, or perhaps with a digital calendar like the example below, available in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff).

Example of a Digital Calendar

Example of a Chart Paper Cale

ndar

Simply put away the Reading Workshop text and move to the calendar, so that you can transition to the Guided Oral Input without needing to speak in English.

“Class, look. (gesture “look.”) “Look means look (gesture).

Show me look. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “Classe, regardez (gesture).

‘Regardez’ (gesture) means ‘look’. (gesture).

Show me ‘regardez’ (gesture).”)

“Class, look (gesture) at the calendar (put your hand on the blank grid).”

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(Write the title “Calendar” in your course language and spell it.)

“C-A-L-E-N-D-R-I-E-R. Look (gesture) at the calendar (put your hand on the grid).”

When you speak about the calendar and weather, do so in a slow, animated voice, with lots of pointing and pausing. You will write the needed words into the blank calendar, such as “August” and “Monday” and the numeral that denotes the date, and perhaps the word “hot” and/or “sunny”.

You are not expected to teach certain words, just to communicate with them as the strategy’s title suggests (Small Talk). So, you do not need to write all the days of the week, or all the kinds of weather. Just write the words you need for the specific lesson today. The focus is on communicating, not on teaching certain words.

The conversation might go something like this (with long pauses of two or more seconds between words in these early stages of them listening to you as you first speak the language): “Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar (point and pause, look at the class). The month ... is … August. (write August in the language, and spell it in the language) A-U-G-U-S-T.”

“August (point to August) … is … the month. M-O-N-T-H. (write “month” in the language, spelling it, and draw a line to August) Class, “month” in English?”

(Some kids call out the word “month”) “Yes, class, the month (point to month) … is … August (point to August).”

“Class, is today…August 21 (jot “21” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 22 (jot “22”)?”

(Some kids call out “22” in a mixture of French and English, which one depending mostly on how much of a risk-taking nature these particular students have) Page 108

“Yes, class, today is August…22 (write 22 on the calendar).”

“Monday (point, but don’t write), Tuesday (point), Wednesday (point), Thursday (point)…Thursday, August 22. (write and spell in your course language) T-H-U-R-S-D-A-Y.” “Class, is today Thursday (point)…or Monday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Thursday” in a mixture of French and English, which one depending mostly on how much of a risk-taking nature these particular students have) “Yes, class, today is Thursday (point). Thursday (point), August (point) 22 (point).”

You have arrived at a good time, having established with perfect clarity to all the students in the classroom what the date today is in the TL, to take a nice deep breath and to smile approvingly at your students. In those moments, much information is conveyed, that: 1) the class will be conducted in the target language, (2) the mood of the class will be positive, (3) the students will not need to “think” as much as “feel” the language in order to get what is going on, and (4) the students will therefore be able to understand without effort and that you will make it easy through your slow speech and visual support.

Quick Quiz This review strategy is simplicity itself, and I use it frequently. This is, by far, the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy that I use the most, and you could probably use this strategy in 75% of your lessons, without it ever getting too stale. Why can you just re-use a strategy like this over and over without it becoming painful?

Because the content of the lesson changes each day. And because, as the year goes on, and you work through this book, you will learn ways to deepen the questions you ask. And, perhaps most importantly of all, because you will adopt the attitude that you are completely justified in this sound pedagogical practice.

You will remind yourself that your own mental health and professional development come first this year, and simplicity is your new standard operating procedure. You will reflect on how you are completely in the right to provide ever-changing content within a strong, pedagogically-sound “I do, we do, you do,” Gradual Release of Responsibility lesson framework. You will tell yourself that yes, the brain does crave novelty, but that, no, the brain does not crave chaos, and that what we are really striving to provide is novelty within safety, and that a consistent, predictable, comfortable structure provides safety.

You simply move to your Review Spot and ask a series of questions about what was just discussed. Where is your Review Spot, you ask? Excellent question. Your Review Spot is the place where you will go each day to physically signal to the students that you are moving on from Guided Oral Input to the next part of the lesson.

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They do not need to know the official names for the lesson parts. They just need to know that there is a point in class where new information is wrapped up, and it is time to review and then transition into Shared Writing.

They really don’t need all the fancy teacher terminology; they just need to live the experience, and they will quickly just “get” how class flows. And then everyone can just relax and get down the road of the year with a nice, easy structure and a sense of safety and predictability in the challenging world we live in.

The best Review Spot I have found is right by the artists’ easel.

Even though you will not have used the artists yet (you will hire and train them later in this book), and thus you really have no reason to be in that particular spot today, you can just get into the habit of standing over there, so that you will have established that as your Review Spot when you do start using the artists’ work, as shown in this photo.

It is far simpler, and thus strongly recommended, especially in My Review Spot

the first lessons, to have the class just chorally respond to your questions. Later you will ask students to write the answers, but I recommend keeping it simple today.

Generally I ask between six and ten questions, or even more. But on the first day, you might ask only two or three, or even just one.

In these first lessons, you are advised to stick to literal review questions and not branch out into asking other questions, but we will add on ways to ask more personalized questions in later sessions. I want these first lessons to feel easy to the students, so I ask ONLY soft-pitch, quick wins, and never any “gotcha” questions.

At the beginning of the term, and throughout the course, especially with beginners,I suggest that you stick to simple “either-or” or “yes-no” questions, and then provide two choices, one of which is correct and the other incorrect. For example, if the class discussed a picture of a colonial mansion in Mexico, you might ask, “Was the house big or small?” Or you might ask, “Yes or no, was the house small? Was it small, or was it not small?”

In addition to saying the correct answer as one of the either-or choices, I recommend that you literally give students the answer as you ask the question, and also provide plenty of “hints” in the form of extra-linguistic information such as vocal inflection, gestures, pointing to visuals, and facial expressions. I have been known to wink, say “a-hem,” tap on or even noisily slap the board where the answer can be seen, or wave a visual aid around, as I ask these “soft-pitch” questions, just to help students see the right answer, so they can have a successful experience interacting in the language.

It is sound pedagogical practice to “give away the answer” because the purpose of the Scaffolded Oral Review is not really to test students’ memories and see if they remember the facts that were discussed during Guided Oral Input, but rather to provide repetitions of the language used in class up till that point, and show Page 110

students how well they are doing at understanding the language, with your expert support and scaffolding, of course.

That’s why this part of the lesson is called Scaffolded Oral Review. Because you are NOT really “quizzing” or “assessing” the students; you are simply reviewing the information from Guided Oral Input together, re-using and re-focusing on the scaffolding that you just used the first time you presented the information.

Today, for Scaffolded Oral Review you will ask one or more either-or questions about the calendar. First, you will set up the expectation that students will listen to you repeat the question before they answer. This is an important expectation, because it basically doubles the amount of input that students will interact with during a Quick Quiz, and during a time when they are extra-primed to pay close attention, to boot - a quiz. Thus, you are very strongly urged to use the suggested procedure outlined below, to set up and reinforce that practice.

“OK, time for a review quiz. I will ask you the question TWO TIMES in French. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, the month …. shhhhh…. the month is August…shhhh…or the month…..shhhhh….is September.shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! The month is August….shhh …. or the month is September?”

(The class calls out, “August!”)

“Yes, class! The month is August.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) The date today is August 21…..shhh….or the date today is August….shhhhh….22.shhhhhh? Shhh! The date today is August 21…shhhh…or the date today is August 22?”

(The class calls out, “August 21!”)

“Yes, class! The date today is August 21.”

You might ask more than two questions, if time permits, but even if you only have time to ask two (or even one) question in this very first lesson, you are reinforcing the language used in Guided Oral Input and also demonstrating to the class that each day there will be a time in the lesson to review. While you will use a Page 111

variety of strategies for Scaffolded Oral Review this year, today you are demonstrating with the most oftenused strategy of a quick call-and-response whole-class Quick Quiz.

Write and Discuss Write and Discuss is a simple, yet incredibly powerful, literacy-building practice. Later in the year, we will begin working with Anchor Charts to help you model traits of strong writing during Shared Writing, but while you get comfortable with Write and Discuss, you will simply pull out the document camera or project from your

Write and Discuss with

computer, or perhaps write on the board or on a

a Document Camera

piece of chart paper.

Whatever format you choose, you will review the information from Guided Oral Input and write or type out some sentences to describe the date, the weather, and the facts that emerged during Guided Oral Input.

You will compose, with the input of the class, a summary of what you just presented and discussed in the Guided Oral Input and reviewed during the Scaffolded Oral Review. These preceding lesson components provided mostly aural (or listening) input. Now, Shared Writing will provide written input in the course language, as well as continued aural input, as you discuss. You guide the students to co-create a text, using a series of questions. By asking questions and filling Reviewing Col

ors by Voting

on

the Pen to Use

in the class’s answers, you re-create the day’s experience together in writing.

As you write, from time to time, it is suggested to read to the students from the beginning, to recycle and repeat and reinforce the previously-written language.

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For example: Write: The Story of Say: The Story of FRENCH class or the story of SPANISH class?

Students: French Class!

Say: Yes, the story of…(writing and spelling in French) F-R-E-N-C-H class.

Write: The month is Say: The month is August or September?

Class: August!

Say: Yes, the month is…(writing and spelling) A-U-G-U-S-T. Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August.

Write: The date today Say: The date today is August 21 or August 22?

Students: August 21!

Say: Yes, the date today is (writing and spelling) A-U-G-U-S-T 22.

Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is August 22.

If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed.

This is when you - time permitting, and remembering that there are still two more lesson components Shared Reading and Student Application and Assessment - add on additional sentences, making up the details with your students and adding them to the text. For example: Say: Look (gesture)…out the window (walk to the window and point) Look (gesture) out the window…is it hot (gesture)…or cold (gesture)?

Look (gesture), is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

Students: (in English or French, depending on students’ ability/inclination) Hot! Say: It is hot (gesture) today? Yes or no?

Students: Yes! Hot! (Walk back to your writing setup) Write: Today it is Say: Class, is it hot (gesture) or very (gesture) hot (gesture)?

Students: Very hot!

Write: V-E-R-Y hot.

Say: Today it is very hot.

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Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is August 22. Today it is very hot.

Today, you will most likely only write one or two sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are building the foundation today. Tomorrow, you will already see the “payoff” for your work today, because when you get to the Shared Writing part of class, your students will act like, “Oh yeah, this is no big deal; this is what we do in this class after we talk about something.” You will soon begin to appreciate Shared Writing for its calming effect, and also for its power to drive big literacy gains. This will be especially apparent when you begin using Anchor Charts, later in the year, as explained later in this book.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. The three “Go-To” strategies are, taken together, a daily powerful instructional sequence that combines language acquisition and conscious learning about language.

Reading these texts is a powerful practice for language acquisition. Since you wrote them with your class, helping them to create a text that is more complex than what they could have produced on their own, these texts are a perfect example of what Dr. Krashen calls i + 1, or “input plus one,” which means input that is just one step higher than what a learner can produce, and containing just a little more language than they can comprehend, just a few elements that stretch them beyond their current level of acquisition.

These little class-created texts are the perfect vehicle for this i + 1. They are the most perfectly-aligned level of text that could possibly exist for your specific class on this particular day.

You will move on to a brief Reading Workshop in which you will use these three “go-to” strategies.

Read in the Language Choral Translation Grammar Discussion (Block Option) Reading from the Back of the Room Block teachers might find that they also have time to introduce this fourth “go-to” strategy, or you can always insert any other reading strategy that has been successful for your students in the past.

The strategies used in Shared Reading are generally more active for students, asking them to interact with the text and sometimes to work in partnerships or independently to process the reading. Therefore, in block classes, it makes sense to spend more time working with shared reading, because the activities are sort of an energy-release valve, allowing students to move into a more active phase of the day’s lesson, after the more listening-focused parts of the lesson.

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Let’s look at each of these strategies in detail.

Read in the Language This strategy is simplicity itself, but it is so valuable that I will recommend that you do it it every single day before moving on to any of the other reading strategies. You simply read the entire text back to the class in L2, exactly as it is written, with no pauses or asides, just allowing students to hear what they wrote, as a whole text. During Shared Writing, students do not hear the entire text as a piece, because of the discussion.

So, reading the piece back to them, without interruptions, is an important first step into shared reading.

Read fluidly, with expression and intonation appropriate to the piece. I like to place my hand or a pointer, such as my pen, at the beginning of each line of text that I read, to help students track. An even more supportive way to move through the text is to place a sheet of blank paper over it, uncovering the text line by line as you read each one. You do not want to read too fast, so that students lose the ability to track the words you are reading in the projected text, but you do want to read fluidly, with expression and phrasing. It sometimes feels a bit magical to students, to hear their writing read back to them as if it were an important piece of literature. It is very honoring to their learning process.

In languages such as Japanese where there are no spaces between the words, it is recommended that you draw circles around each separate word, including particles, as you read to the class. This might mean that you read more slowly and deliberately. That is fine; you might choose to read the text again to them, with the circles in it, in a more fluid fashion, after they can see the words as separate entities with circles around them.

Choral Translation with Grammar Discussion This powerful shared reading strategy has also become a daily practice for me, since I first learned it from Ben Slavic.

In fact, many days all we have time to do with the text we wrote is Read in the Language and then Choral Translation and Grammar Discussion, and that is a perfectly satisfying and educationally-sound lesson.

After reading the text in the language, go back through the piece and have students translate it word by word, chorally saying the meaning of each word in the text in their stronger

Circling the Class’s Noticings and

Teaching Into Them

shared language. Having students translate word by word, and even coming up with ways to say a possible meaning for words that really have no equivalent meaning in English, can reveal much about their linguistic knowledge.

It is recommended that you not translate aloud along with the class, but rather point to each word silently, as the class translates chorally, so you can listen for their hesitations, confusions, and inaccuracies. Then, you Page 115

can teach into those moments, circling the “problem word”, very briefly explaining the grammar to them, and writing a bit on the text to show the meaning or the language phenomenon that caused the breakdown in ability to match words between the languages.

This practice meets the ACTFL standard of Comparisons, which includes the learning target of comparing linguistic systems, “Learners use the language to investigate, explain, and reflect on the nature of language through comparisons of the language studied and their own.”

I like to use a colored pen (Flair pens are my ideal pen for this) to point to the words one by one as the class translates. The first few times I set up the

Many grammar points naturally come up in context.

activity, I say to the students, “You are going to read together in English. I will point to the words and your job is to read them in the exact order I am pointing to, and to stay with the class and my pointer, not going too fast, or too slow, or too loud, or too quiet. The English might be in a weird order, but that is just how languages work. It’s why I get paid the ‘medium-size’ bucks; you need a teacher to help you figure out what order to put the French in. OK, let’s start here. 3-2-1-go!”

A note on classroom management: sometimes I pretend that I can tell that not everyone is reading. Usually, I cannot really tell that, but I pretend from time to time, especially the first few times we do this. By pretending, I convey to the students that I really mean business and that everyone should participate, reading together. I just say, after they read a few words, in a pleasant yet no-nonsense voice, “Not everyone is reading together.

Let’s go back and start over.” This is slightly frustrating for kids, and so they generally begin to exhibit better participation, because they do not want to have to start over. If students read too fast, I make them go back and re-read, staying together.

By having students reveal their understanding of the various words in French, even those which might not have a direct English translation, I can teach into the places where they do not yet understand how French compares with English. For example, in French, there are most often two parts to the written negation of a verb. To say, “I am not”, which in English requires three words, you would write four words in French, “Je ne suis pas.”

Thus, students who do not yet know that there are two words in French to express what is generally expressed in one English word will tend to translate the french sentence “Je ne suis pas française” (I am not French) as “I not am…” and then get a bit confused or hesitant when they need to say something for the word “pas” since they can, by reading the next word, see that “French” would be the next word in English. So they will naturally hesitate there, if they have not yet learned or figured out that “pas” also means “not” in French.

In this situation, you would want to simply say, “In French, ne and also pas both work together to say what in English is one word — not.” Then, you will simply circle the words ne and pas, ideally using a different color pen or marker, and write “not” above them, or put a slash through them to indicate negation, like a “No Smoking” sign.

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Then, once this short little explanation is done, and now that students have a visual representation of the words’ meaning, you will want them to take another pass at the translation, to solidify their learning and increase the chances that they will retain this linguistic information as they interpret its meaning once more in a meaningful, comprehensible context.

Simply say, “OK, let’s start over here,” putting your pointer under the first word in the sentence, or maybe in the first word of the phrase, if the sentence is very long, and starting them over with their English translation, so that they get a “running start” on the word(s) you translated, in a meaningful context.

You must do this backing up to the beginning of the sentence or phrase every time, beginning with the very first one on the very first day, with good cheer and an attitude of “You will like this,” so that students just think, “This is what we do when we read,” and it seems normal, so they will not grumble about having to re-read.

It is not recommended to parse each and every word in the text, or to give in to the temptation to teach them every cool language feature we as teachers and confirmed Grammar Nerds find interesting, as student motivation in the activity will tend to wane, and they will likely become overloaded with new linguistic facts.

However, when they hesitate or display confusion, it is a good time to stop and explain the language in this fashion.

You do not want to talk about every single cool language feature because you do not want to nerd out too strongly with all the fascinating-to-you grammar hocus-pocus, because not every kid in class is likely to share your passion for French verb conjugations. However, we all know that there are junior Grammar Nerds in ever class, and if you have been teaching in a communicative way for very long at all, you have probably found yourself in conflict with a few of these budding linguists from time to time because they really want to learn all the grammar.

Hey, I totally get it. I love grammar too. For these students, it is especially recommended that you make a daily practice of explaining some of the language that trips the class up in general, and also perhaps a couple of “can’t miss” viewpoints on the Scenic Tour of the French Language. You will also want to invite them, and the rest of your students, to discuss features of the language that they noticed in the reading, after you have concluded the choral translation.

Class Grammar Discussion After the translation, ask, “Did anyone notice anything about French that they could teach the class?” For me, this wording is important, because of the authority it confers upon the students, and I use it almost every time I do this, which is to say almost every day, because I really prioritize this invitation to share our noticings about the language.

The reason that I make such a point of conducting these short class discussions of the language on a daily basis is because it has benefits for the whole class and for me, as their teacher. For the grammar crowd, it provides an opportunity to do the analytical contrastive linguistic work that they crave. It gives them the chance to be publicly acknowledged for their ability to draw inferences and comparisons from the data presented in the reading.

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I make a big deal about their noticings, saying things like, “Wow, you are really thinking like a linguist! That’s a scientist who studies how language works!” or “That is such a cool thing to notice! Way to use your noggin!

Why do you think the language does that?” If someone asks a question, I first turn it back to their peers, to see if anyone in class has anything to offer by way of an answer. I generally say something like, “Hey, good question! Does anyone have an idea of why that might be?”

These remarks have been carefully crafted over the years I have worked with students, to decenter teacher authority over the “Rules of the Language” and invite more students into the Grammar Fan Club. Our brains are meaning-making machines, and we are programmed to notice and analyze patterns. It should be noted that I am referring here to our conscious minds, our prefrontal cortices, the thinking part of our brains.

Language acquisition is not a conscious process, and so this activity, as well as choral translation, are not designed for language acquisition, but rather to give students’ conscious minds, their higher-order thinking, a little workout in the middle of a whole bunch of language acquisition during most of the rest of the period.

Your Grammar Superstars will really appreciate the daily exercise for their frontal lobes.

This daily practice of inviting the class to engage in a short grammar discussion helps students like this to calm down during Guided Oral Input and Scaffolded Oral Review, knowing that there is always an opportunity for them to ask questions and do this language work, with the class’s shared text. Plus, who knows, but you may be raising up a new generation of linguists or college language teachers, who will understand both the conscious grammar and also how they got their start in French by getting tons and tons of communicative input in the language.

Your little Junior Linguistics Society of America members are not the only students who benefit from this practice of short, frequent grammar discussions. For the kids who would not naturally think grammar study was all that interesting, there are also benefits to this regular grammar discussion. In fact, the benefits for them might well be greater than those derived by the grammar lovers.

When these students have regular opportunities to see their peers pointing out what they noticed about the language, they have a chance to revise their own self-concept as language students. Imagine that you are a not-so-enthralled student of the linguistic arts, and you are sitting there reading along, and then the teacher ask the class to point out things they noticed, or share questions that they have, and you realize you they, too, had already noticed that thing the language does, or you realize that you would have given the same explanation of what is going on in the reading as one of the nerdier folks in class.

You might well, in that case, have a little private moment of, “Oh, I noticed that too,” and thus a growing sense that you, too, can analyze the language system for patterns from which you can derive inferences. In fact, you might very well develop more confidence about yourself as a language learner, from just sitting around and quietly noticing that you are quite capable of noticing how language works.

When your students continue on to other teachers, or want to know more about how language works, these experiences might well give them confidence that it is completely possible for them to analyze the structure of the language. At the very least, they can sit back and listen to what is interesting to their peers, and see that normal, everyday kids can actually deduce linguistic principles from the language.

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This experience might even, over time, open the door, just a crack, for them to peek into the Grammar Club, and may even, eventually, change their concept of themselves, into a person who notices patterns in linguistic data, just the same as everyone else. I believe that these short, simple, daily forays into kid-centered language work can really help these students to be more successful in any required grammar study, if and when they encounter it in their language careers. This is an excellent example of the ACTFL Core Practice of “teaching grammar as a concept, in context.” By just lightly touching on grammar each day during Shared Reading, we can make a regular practice of introducing students to some conscious language study that is in alignment with the ACTFL recommendations for our teaching.

Reading from the Back of the Room This strategy, which I also learned from Ben Slavic, is one of my very favorites, and it is especially rewarding to do this when adults are visiting your class. It is most impressive to see a class having a rather deep, flowing class discussion in another language.

However, blowing the minds of folks who stop into your class is certainly not the only reason to do Reading from the Back of the Room. This strategy is also very satisfying for you as the teacher, as you see your students’ ability to turn away from the class text and use the language that was introduced that day, perhaps even

My Reading from the Back of the

Room Spot

language that they heard for the first time that day, in an authentic class discussion of the ideas in the text.

After finishing up your grammar discussion in the class’s stronger shared language, this strategy also gets the class right back into the flow of the course language. You simply walk to a comfortable spot in the back of the room and begin asking questions. I have a big teacher desk back there and I like to sit on it, take a load off, and conduct the discussion from a comfy spot.

If you always head to the same spot each time you do this strategy, students will soon become accustomed to turning around and participating in a discussion in the course language, and you can therefore minimize the English you need to use as you transition to this activity.

You might have students stand up and walk to the opposite side of the room, and remain standing during this activity. This is a nice way to help them focus at this point in class, and moving to a new spot is said to help refresh the brain and aid in memory formation. At the very least, a change of location and moving to a standing position helps to “reset” students’ attention so that they can better attend to the discussion.

After students have become familiar with the routine of standing up and crossing the room to find a spot to stand in, you can change this procedure up. You can say, in the course language, more specific directions to add another layer of variety to the transition. You might say things such as: Take 9 steps. Take 17 baby Page 119

steps. Take three giant steps. High five six people on your way across the room. Say “Bonjour” to four people on your way across the room.

The first few times you read from the back of the room, I recommend saying something like this to the class in English as you walk to your comfy spot and get settled in for this very enjoyable strategy: “OK we are going to discuss what we wrote. (Maybe if you want to establish the walking routine, you might also say something like, “Stand up, walk to the opposite side of the room, and turn to look at me back here.”) If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.” Then, you can begin the questions in the course language.

You do not need to pre-plan the questions, and in fact the discussion really feels more authentic, interesting, and free if you just follow the class’s energy. The reason this strategy is called Reading from the Back of the Room is because you are reading the text, which you can see behind the students as it is still projected or displayed where you just finished working with it. As you scan the text, you can just take your questions from the information that you and the class just wrote. It’s an easy, no-prep activity that is really quite satisfying, because it generally makes everyone feel pride in their ability to have a rather high-level discussion in the language.

Here on the first day of class, you will want to give “soft-pitch" easy wins — either-or questions about the text, with lots of visual scaffolding, so that you are basically giving them the answer. You might, especially in upper-level classes, find that, even on the first day, you can move into less-structured questions, such as asking for details of the text like where, what, etc.

Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English

“Giving Away the Answer” Using

Gestures

together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) “The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is August 22. Today it is very hot.”

“Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: the story…of….the…class….of?) (sensing confusion, you circle “de”) “This word means ‘of,’ so in French we say ‘the class OF French.” (write “of” in English) Let’s back up to here and go again. (class reads: the story…of….the…class….of…French…the month is august…the date…) (sensing confusion, you circle “d’aujourd’hui”) “This word means ‘of today’ which is a really long complicated word in French, huh?” (write “of today” in English) Let’s back up to here and go again. (class reads: the date…of today…is…the 22…of…)

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(sensing confusion, you circle “22”) “It sounds like you are noticing that in French, we say the twenty-two, but in English we say the “twenty-second. ” (write “22nd” in English) Let’s back up to here and go again. (class reads: the date…of today…is…the 22nd…of…August…) (you circle “aujourd’hui”) (class reads: Today…is…very hot) “Did anyone notice anything about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room and settled into a comfy spot where you can relax a little after all this bopping around. If you train your body to SIT during this time, you will build in a ready-made daily rest period for your body whenever you use this strategy. I use it in about 75% of my class sessions, so I really appreciate having a nice routine of relaxing a little during Reading From the Back of the Room.)

“We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

“Is this French class…or Spanish class?” (the class responds: French!)

“Yes, this is French class. Is the month August…or is the month February?” (the class responds: August!)

“Yes, the month is August. Is the date today August 21…or is the date today August 22?” (the class responds: August 22!)

“Yes, the date is August 22.”

Quick Quiz The end-of-class Quick Quiz is almost identical to the Student Application and Assessment. The only real difference is that you will move to your “Quiz Spot” instead of your “Review Spot.”

My own Quiz Spot is in the back of the room, by the door, so that I have a good vantage point to observe and connect with students as they prepare to leave class.

Just like in the Student Application and Assessment, I want students to listen to the question twice, because that gives processing time as well as more repetitions of the language.. So, again, I do a lot of “shhhing” as I ask the question the first time, to remind them not to call out the answer.

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“Shh” in between words

as I ask the question the

first time

I used in class. Here I Lots of the same scaffolding that word “said.” am using a gesture to scaffold the

Further, the Quick Quiz, especially on this first day, is not a “gotcha.” So, if needed, you can still use gestures, facial expressions, or even walk to the board or Shared Writing text, to point out visuals that might make the questions more comprehensible. You want students to leave class today, and every day, with a feeling of pride and wonder that they were able to conduct almost an entire class period in the language, and you want them convinced that you are a magical unicorn who makes it easy for them to understand a whole ‘nother language!

Your Student Application and Assessment today might go something like this: “OK, time for a final check to see what you learned. I will ask you the question TWO TIMES in French. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, the month …. shhhhh…. the month is August…shhhh…or the month…..shhhhh….is September.shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! The month is August….shhh …. or the month is September?”

(The class calls out, “August!”)

“Yes, class! The month is August.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) The date today is August 21…..shhh….or the date today is August….shhhhh….22.shhhhhh? Shhh! The date today is August 21…shhhh…or the date is August 22?”

(The class calls out, “August 21!”)

“Yes, class! The date today is August 21.”

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 2

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner: answer questions with one or more words in French about the weather and date.

Intermediate: answer questions with sentences in French about the weather and date and compare the weather here with locations in the francophone world Advanced: answer questions with strings of sentences in French, to describe the weather today and the activities that people in class are doing, and describe the weather yesterday

Again, greet the students in English, review where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and that this is the best way for them to learn!

Tell them that each day the first activity of class will be reading about a student’s dreams/goals for the school year, and then you will continue the discussion of the calendar and weather that you began yesterday.

You might want to set up your Videographer before you begin this lesson. If so, please see the HR Manual in the Appendices for the Videographer job description and some guidance on how to interview and hire for the student jobs.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text (an example is provided below and you can download this text in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff). Then, share the lesson objective, check in with your Class Starter, and have them give the signal (or give it yourself) and begin speaking in the language.

Find That Cognate Project or distribute paper copies of a short text that has many cognates. You can download these texts from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) or create your own. When preparing your own text for the Find That Cognate strategy, it is best to think of a category of words that naturally contains a lot of cognates. For instance, these examples use the cognate-heavy categories of school activities.

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Italian Example

German Example

The following Reading Workshop example texts use the cognate-heavy topic of fruits, with varying degrees of difficulty for various levels of classes. Of course, here in the very first lesson, you are strongly cautioned not to choose texts that are intimidating, even with your upper-level classes.

I strongly recommend that leveled texts, like the following, be used after at least three days of super-easy, one-level-fits-all texts. See the notes in Session One for more recommendations on choosing leveled texts.

Spanish Beginner Cognate Reading

Spanish Intermediate Cognate Reading

Spanish Advanced Cognate Reading

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In the sample lesson, I use the cognate reading below, in French. Again, this is a one-level-fits-all “launching lesson” text. It is designed to be super-easy and super-successful, and I recommend using it for all your classes, to build confidence and motivation at the beginning of the year.

French “Launching” All-Levels Reading

Please note that the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use this standard black text. The words that are said in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me and many teachers in the US) are written in this color.

Again, you will notice that, in the first lessons of the year, there continues to be a good deal of English used to set up and explain the lesson structure and the specific strategies/activities/procedures. Please be assured that, as the lessons go on, the session outlines will use less and less English, as your students and you become comfortable and familiar with the lesson framework and the “go-to” strategies, so that you can conduct more and more of the lessons in the language as time goes on. This is one of the great benefits of a daily instructional framework for World Language teachers — it supports more communication in the languages we teach, because it cuts down on new instructions. This is due to the repeated nature of the lesson structure and the strategies within it.

Now we will move on to the lesson procedures:

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed: “Let’s read this student’s list of dreams or goals for the school year. Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates, the words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

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(If you have a Videographer, have them begin the video. Have the Class Starter give the signal.)

“We will read this text and talk about the cognates, and then we will talk more about the calendar. I will read in French and remember that your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand French, by pointing and talking slowly and clearly. Shawn, let’s go!”

(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(This is the contents of the sample reading text. Read aloud in the language.) “My dreams. School year 2021-2021. Study. Communicate with teachers. Listen to French music. Investigate universities.

Participate in a school club. Ideas: Theatre, Technology, Black Lives Matter.”

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘ideas’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, idea in English, is idea. I-D-E-A. Idea.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, idée en anglais est idea. eeyy - dayyy - uhh accent aigu - uhh (saying letters in French). Idée.”)

(Moving on to another cognate,) “Class, ‘theatre' in English? Yes, theatre in English, is theatre (or drama). T-H-E-A-T-R-E.” (Asking a more open-ended question (you might skip this in beginner classes).)

“Class, look. (gesture “look.”) “Look means look (gesture). Show me look. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “Classe, regardez (gesture).

‘Regardez’ (gesture) means ‘look’. (gesture). Show me ‘regardez’ (gesture).”

(See Session One for an important note on the management of these gestures.)

(Moving on, speaking in the language and getting back to the sentence that prompted the gesturing,) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

“Can you read any other words?”

(Getting back into the language, and repeating the same words that you just used in that little English aside,) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

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(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, technology in English, is technology. T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y.” Take a few more cognates, or ask questions (like the example for “ideas” above) if students do not volunteer.

After a few minutes, you will want to move into the Guided Oral Input, and continue the calendar discussion.

Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) You will continue writing on the calendar that you began yesterday.

Simply put away the Reading Workshop text and move to the calendar, so that you can transition to the Guided Oral Input without needing to speak in English.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar (point and pause, look at the class). The month ... is … August. (put your hand under August, which you wrote on the calendar yesterday) Class, “month” in English?”

(Some kids call out the word “month”) “Yes, class, the month (point to month) … is … August (put your hand under August).”

“Is the month August…or…December?”

(Some kids call out “August” in French or English; depending mostly on how much of a risk-taking nature these particular students have) “Class, is today…August 22 (jot “22” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 23 (jot “23”)?”

(Some kids call out “23”) “Yes, class, today is August…23 (write 23 on the calendar).”

“Monday (point, but don’t write), Tuesday (point), Wednesday (point), Thursday (point), Friday (point)…Friday, August 23. (write and spell in your course language) F-R-I-D-A-Y.” “Class, is today Friday (point)…or Monday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Friday” ) “Yes, class, today is Friday (point). Friday (point), August (point) 23 (point).”

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“Class, think.”(gesture “think.”) “Think means think (gesture).

Show me think. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “Classe, pensez (gesture).

‘Pensez’ (gesture) means ‘think’. (gesture). Show me ‘pensez’ (gesture).”)

(Note: after introducing a new gesture, cycle back through any previously-established gestures (at this point, you only have one (look) from yesterday) and end with the new gesture, to transition back to the communication that prompted you to teach the new word/gesture.)

“Show me look. (gesture). Show me think. (gesture)” “Class, think (gesture) about Friday (put your hand on the word Friday that you just wrote on the calendar in the language).”

Think (gesture) about Friday. (You might mime being happy as you act out thinking about Friday, since most people like Fridays so much.)

Think (gesture) about Monday (write on the calendar in the language and spell). M-O-N-D-A-Y (You might mime being sad/tired/disgusted as you think about Monday, since most people dislike Mondays.)

Class, think (gesture) about Friday (mime happy) and think (gesture) about Monday (mime yuck).

Who…(gesture with an expansive, two-hands-out, “everyone” gesture, and then raise one hand as if to answer a question)…who…in the class (if “class” is a cognate for you; if not, skip it)…who (gesture) in the class…prefers (gesture)…

Prefers means prefers (gesture).

Show me prefers. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “‘Préfère’ (gesture) means ‘prefers’. (gesture). Show me ‘préfère’ (gesture).”)

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(Note: after introducing a new gesture, cycle back through any previously-established gestures (it sounds smoother if you say any other verbs in the same conjugation that the first verb naturally used in the original communication, in this case third-person singular) and end with the new gesture, to transition back to the communication that prompted you to teach the new word/gesture.)

“Show me looks. (gesture). Show me thinks. (gesture) Show me prefers. (gesture)” “Class, think (gesture) about Friday (put your hand on the word Friday that you just wrote on the calendar in the language).

Who (expansive “everyone” gesture and then raise one hand) prefers (gesture) Mondays (gesture)?” (before taking answers, ask in English: What did I ask?) (students say, “Who prefers Monday?”)

“Yes, class, think (gesture). Look (gesture) at Monday (hand on Monday).

Think (gesture). Who (gesture, hand raised) in the class prefers (gesture) Mondays?”

(Stand with your hand up, looking expectantly at the class for raised hands to indicate who prefers Mondays.

Often, this is a funny moment, since no hands are raised, or maybe only one or two people raise their hands.)

(If some hands are raised:) (Counting on your fingers and gesturing to the raised hands to make it obvious that you are tallying the votes) One, two.

(If no hands are raised:) (Look at the class in mock astonishment, pretend that you can only conclude that they obviously did not understand the question, and repeat, very very slowly and very very clearly as if to “correct” their understanding because clearly there cannot be a class in which no one likes Mondays (sarcasm)!)

“Class, think (gesture) and look (gesture) at Monday (hand on Monday).

Who…(gesture, raise hand)…in the class (gesture to the class)…who…(gesture)…prefers (gesture)…

Mondays (hand on Monday)…(raise your hand and look expectantly at the class).”

(If still no hands are raised) “Class, my job is to speak slowly and clearly so you understand French. I’m just not sure you are understanding, because no one is answering. Listen again.”

“Class, think (gesture) and look (gesture) at Monday (hand on Monday).

Who…(gesture, raise hand)…in the class (gesture to the class)…who…(gesture)…prefers (gesture)…

Mondays (hand on Monday)…(raise your hand and look expectantly at the class).”

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(If still no hands are raised, say in mock astonishment) “Class, ZERO (gesture a zero with your hand) people prefer (gesture) Mondays!”

(This is optional, but it can be really fun.)

“Class, look (gesture) at Monday! ZERO (or two) people like Monday…Monday is SAD!” (mime being sad, and draw a sad face on Monday. If time permits, you can also draw a happy face on Friday and tell the class that X people like Friday, or 100% of the class likes Friday, and that Friday is happy.)

(If time permits, begin discussing the weather. Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)…is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

Look, is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Hot!/Cold!)

It is hot (gesture) today? Yes or no?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Yes! Hot!/No! Cold!)

Class, is it hot (gesture) or VERY (gesture) hot (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot. (write and spell) V-E-R-Y hot.

If time permits, you might continue on, using the gestures that you have already established, to ask questions like “Who in the class prefers when it is hot? Who prefers when it is VERY hot? Who prefers when it is cold? VERY cold?”

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You can tabulate/record the numbers of students who respond to each option, either by counting and writing tally marks or a numeral, or by writing (and perhaps also spelling) students’ names. You can ask who is happy/sad (using the faces you drew on the calendar) when it is hot, cold, very hot, etc, or on Mondays, Fridays, the weekend.

Quick Quiz We will use the same Scaffolded Oral Review strategy that you introduced yesterday. In Session Three, you will introduce a slight variation on the Quick Quiz, a True-False Quiz. If you find yourself feeling internal pressure to “move on to something new” or introduce more “novelty,” you might tell yourself that yes, the brain does crave novelty, but that, no, the brain does not crave chaos, and that what we are really striving to provide is novelty within safety, and that a consistent, predictable, comfortable structure provides safety.

Move to your Review Spot and ask a series of questions about what was just discussed.

Generally I ask between six and ten questions, or even more. But on the first days, you might ask only two or three, or even just one, depending on your class schedule.

Just as in the first session, you are advised to stick to literal review questions and not branch out into asking other questions. At the beginning of the year, I suggest that you stick to simple “either-or” or “yes-no” questions, and then provide two choices, one of which is correct and the other incorrect. Additionally, I recommend that you literally give students the answer as you ask the question, and also provide plenty of “hints” in the form of extra-linguistic information such as vocal inflection, gestures, pointing to visuals, and facial expressions.

After moving to the Review Spot, you will say: “OK, time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, Monday …. shhhhh…. is happy…shhhh…or Monday is…..shhhhh….sad…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! Monday is happy….shhh …. or Monday is sad?”

(The class calls out, “Sad!”) “Yes, class! Monday is sad.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) The date today is Friday, August 22…..shhh….or the date today is Monday, August….shhhhh…..23…shhhhhh? Shhh! The date today is Friday, August 22…shhhh…or the date today is Monday, August 23?”

(The class calls out, “Friday!” or “August 23!” or “Friday, August 23!”)

“Yes, class! The date today is Friday, August 23.”

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Write and Discuss The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. You will follow the same procedure as in Session One. Write and Discuss is truly a powerful, low, low-prep strategy that pay off BIG in student literacy, for very little investment on your part. It’s the ultimate win-win.

If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed. See Session One for an example.

Today, you will most likely only write two or three sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are building the foundation in these first lessons. You will probably notice that even in the second lesson of the year, students are already more comfortable and Shared Writing (and the rest of the lesson framework) goes more smoothly, with less need to explain/give directions in English.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Write: The Story of Say: The Story of FRENCH class or the story of MATH class?

Students: French Class!

Say: Yes, the story of…(writing and spelling in French) F-R-E-N-C-H class.

Write: The month is Say: The month is August or September?

Class: August!

Say: Yes, the month is…(writing and spelling) A-U-G-U-S-T. Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August.

Write: The date today Say: The date today is Friday, August 22 or Friday, August 23?

Students: Friday, August 23!

Say: Yes, the date today is (writing and spelling) F-R-I-D-A-Y, A-U-G-U-S-T 23.

Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is Friday, August 23.

Write: Friday is Say: Class, who (gesture) prefers (gesture) Friday?

Class: raised hands Say: One, two, three…(counting)…29 people prefer Friday! Who (gesture) prefers (gesture) Mondays?

One…(counting). One person prefers Mondays! Friday is POPULAR! (Note: “popular” is a cognate in many languages. If your language does not have a cognate to use here, you might say “Monday is sad” or “Friday is happy” or some other statement that comes directly from the Guided Oral Input. In languages with many cognates, the more-obvious ones can easily be used in Shared Writing to provide richer vocabulary.)

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Say: Friday is POPULAR….or VERY (gesture “big”) popular?

Students: VERY! Write: is very popular.

Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is Friday, August 23. Friday is very popular.

Say: ONE person (hold up finger) prefers (gesture) Fridays…or a LOT (gesture “big/lots”) of people prefer Fridays?

Students: A LOT! Write: A lot of people prefer Fridays.

Reading/Recycling: The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is Friday, August 23. Friday is very popular. A lot of people prefer Fridays.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. You will continue to use the three “Go-To” strategies introduced in Session One (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits). These strategies, taken together, are a daily powerful instructional sequence that combines language acquisition and conscious learning about language.

Read in the Language Choral Translation Grammar Discussion (Block Option) Reading from the Back of the Room

Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) The story of French class. The month is August. The date today is Friday, August 23. Friday is very popular. A lot of people prefer Fridays.

“Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!”

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(class reads: the story…of….the…class….of…French…the…month…is…August…the…date…of today…) (you realize that the students remembered one of the teaching points from Shared Reading yesterday) “Hey, you remembered that this (circling it and writing “of” in English) means “of” and this (circling it and writing “today” in English) part means “today!” Well done! Let’s start here.” (class reads: the date…of today…is…Friday….the…23…August…?) (sensing confusion, you circle “Le”) “This word means ‘the’ which we have to say here in French but we don’t have to say “the Frrday” in English (write “the” in English) Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: the date…of today…is…Friday the 23…of…August. The…Friday…is…very…) (students just read a word they were never “taught”) “WOW, I never even taught you what “très” means, and your brains just figured it out from the context! Nice job, brains! You guys are SO SMART. Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: the…Friday…is…very…popular… a lot…??) (sensing confusion, you circle “beaucoup”). “This word means “a lot.” In English “a lot” is two words. In French, it is one word. This is “of” (circle “de”) so “beaucoup de” means “a lot of.” Three words in English, and just two in French. Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: a lot…of…people…prefer…the…Friday) “Well done. Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) “We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

“Is this French class…or Spanish class?” (the class responds: French!)

“Yes, this is French class. Is the month August…or is the month February?” (the class responds: August!)

“Yes, the month is August. Is the date today August 21…or is the date today August 22?” (the class responds: August 22!)

“Yes, the date is August 22.”

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Quick Quiz Just like in the Student Application and Assessment, I want students to listen to the question twice. So, again, I do a lot of “shhhing” as I ask the question the first time, to remind them not to call out the answer. Further, the Quick Quiz is not a “gotcha.” You can still use gestures, facial expressions, or even walk to the board or Shared Writing text, to point out visuals that might make the questions more comprehensible.

Your Student Application and Assessment today might go something like this: “OK, time for a final check. You will listen to the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk.

Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, the month …. shhhhh…. the month is August…shhhh…or the month…..shhhhh….is September.shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! The month is August….shhh …. or the month is September?”

(The class calls out, “August!”)

“Yes, class! The month is August.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) The date today is August 21…..shhh….or the date today is August….shhhhh….22.shhhhhh? Shhh! The date today is August 21…shhhh…or the date today is August 22?”

(The class calls out, “August 21!”)

“Yes, class! The date today is August 21.”

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 3

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner:

answer questions with one or more words in French about the weather and date..

Intermediate: answer questions with sentences in French about the weather and date and compare the weather here with locations in the francophone world Advanced: answer questions with strings of sentences in French, to describe the weather today and the activities that people in class are doing, and describe the weather yesterday Notes/Prep: To prepare for the lesson in Session 5, Card or Slide Talk, you might want to go ahead and tell the students to upload (for Slide Talk) or think about (to sketch on a card for Card Talk) a place they like to go. You can leave this very general (simply “a place you like to go”) or ask for more specific information (in the example in Session 5, I will ask students to upload images of a place they like to go that you can walk to from our school.

You could also ask them for places they like to go in summer, or places they would like to go, perhaps a place they would like to go to speak the course language, or places they like to study, or places they like to go to have fun.)

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, you might want to do that before you begin this lesson. If so, please see the HR Manual in the Appendices for the Videographer job description and some guidance on how to interview and hire for the student jobs. It is very highly recommended that you have a Videographer.

Why is a Videographer such a useful student job?

(1) You have recordings of the class activities, which can be a lifesaver in spring when you need some less energy-intensive lesson plans. You can conduct a Film Festival or a Festival of Worksheets (explained later in the year) using the best videos from the year. You will also have a ready-made record of what happened in class, perfect for make-up work, or even to use for sub days (so students can re-watch a previous lesson, in case you do not have a sub who speaks your language). (1) You have recordings of the class activities, which can be a lifesaver in spring when you need some less energy-intensive lesson plans. You can conduct a Film Festival or a Festival of Worksheets (explained later in the year) using the best videos from the year.

You will also have a ready-made record of what happened in class, perfect for make-up work, or even to use for sub days (so students can re-watch a previous lesson, in case you do not have a sub who speaks your language). You can simply leave extension activities to accompany the recording of the lesson, for absent students or sub plans.

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(2) You will have a record of the behavior of the class. Even if you never need to use the recording in a discipline situation, the mere act of recording each class sends a message to students that you take class time so seriously that you keep a record. Often, taking video each day supports classroom management because students feel some pressure to be their best selves when there is a camera going (even if it is not filming them directly).

(3) You will have video to watch your own teaching. It’s not always something that teachers are eager to do watch themselves teach in a video - but it is so valuable that I will be encouraging you throughout the year to watch your videos. If you start now, you will have the most complete record possible, so that you can see your growth over time. I promise, it gets easier. I was completely terrified to watch myself teaching, until I forced myself to video my class each day, and I learned so much about myself as a teacher, and my skills improved so much, that I just have to recommend it to you, with a very strong sense of urgency. If you just dive in now, you will have a good collection of videos when you do decide to take the plunge. It’s nerveracking…but SO worth it.

Continue to greet the students in English, review where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and they need to work together to focus ad listen because that is the best way to help yourself and everyone else be successful in this class. Tell them that each day the first activity of class will be reading about a student’s dreams/goals for the school year, and then you will continue the discussion of the calendar and weather that you began yesterday.

Hand out (or project/display) a Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from the first lesson(s) of the year.

Then, share the lesson objective, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and have them give the signal (or give it yourself if no one has yet to volunteer for the job), and begin filming if you are starting that today, and then begin speaking in the language.

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Italian Beginner Cognate Reading

Find That Cognate and Pronunciation Practice Project or distribute the text. These example texts use the cognateheavy topic of exercise and videos, with varying degrees of difficulty for various levels of classes. You might here in the third lesson (or the second lesson for block classes) begin to use more challenging texts with your upper-level classes. See the notes in Session One for more recommendations on choosing leveled texts.

Italian Intermediate Cognate Reading

Italian Advanced Cognate Reading

In the sample lesson, I use the French beginner reading below.

French Beginner Cognate Reading

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As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use this standard black text. The words that are said in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me and many teachers in the US) are written in this color.

Now we will move on to the lesson procedures:

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed: “Let’s read this text about “The Top Ten Tropical Fruits”. We are going to use this text to practice our French pronunciation. First, I will read in French. Then we will discuss the words, and then we will use the reading to work on our pronunciation.”

(If you have a Videographer, have them begin the video.)

“Remember that your only job is to participate - listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand. Shawn, let’s go!”

(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(Read the text aloud in the language.)

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘passionfruit’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, passionfruit in English, is passionfruit. P-A-S-S-I-O-N-F-R-U-I-T. Passionfruit.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, fruit de la passion en anglais est passionfruit. effff - arrr - ewwww - eeey tayyyy - - espace - dayyyy - uhhhh - espace - ehlll - ahhhh - espace - payyy - ahhhh - essss - esss- eeeh ohhh - ehnnnn (saying letters in French). Fruit de la passion.”)

(Repeat with another cognate, or move on to open-ended questions as explained below, or move on to the pronunciation practice, as explained further below.)

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point to the word cognate in the readings or write it on the board with translation)?”

“Can you read any other words?”

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point)?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, technology in English, is technology. T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y.” Page 139

Take a few more cognates, either by asking what a word is in English or by taking what volunteers noticed. If there are not many volunteers, or if no one wants to speak up, you can just ask the questions yourself.

Pronunciation Practice “Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ a little more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, and continue the calendar discussion.

Small Talk (Calendar and Weather) You will continue writing on the calendar today. This is the last “straight up” calendar lesson. After today, we will be working with more content, and the calendar will be a shorter part of the opening routine for the rest of the year.

Move to the calendar to transition to the Guided Oral Input.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…August 27 (jot “27” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 28 (jot “23”)?”

(Some kids call out “27”) “Yes, class, today is August…27 (write 27 on the calendar).”

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“Class, is today Friday (point)…or Monday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Monday” ) “Yes, class, today is Monday (point). Friday (point), August (point) 27 (point).”

“Class, think (gesture) about Monday (point).”Who…(gesture)…who…in the class…who (gesture) in the class…prefers (gesture)…Monday?

Who…(gesture)…who…in the class…likes (gesture)…

Likes means likes (gesture). Show me likes. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “‘Aime’ (gesture) means ‘likes’. (gesture). Show me ‘aime’ (gesture).”)

(Cycling through previously-established gestures) “Show me thinks. (gesture). Show me likes. (gesture) Show me prefers. Show me looks. (gesture) Show me likes (gesture).”

Who…(gesture)…who…in the class…who (gesture) in the class…likes (gesture) Monday?”

(Tabulate answers) Who loves (gesture)…

Loves means loves (gesture). Show me loves. (gesture)” (Note: This sounds like: “‘Adore’ (gesture) means ‘loves’. (gesture). Show me ‘adore’ (gesture).”)

(Cycling through previously-established gestures) “Show me thinks. (gesture).

Show me likes. (gesture) Show me prefers. Show me looks. (gesture) Show me likes (gesture). Show me loves (gesture)”

Who loves (gesture) Mondays?

(Tabulate answers, and it is usually fun to pretend that you are shocked that no one likes Monday, especially if today is actually Monday.)

Think (gesture) about Monday, and Tuesday (write and spell Tuesday) T-U-E-S-D-A-Y. Who prefers (gesture) Tuesdays?

(Tabulate answers) Think (gesture) about Tuesday, and Wednesday (write and spell Wednesday) WE-D-N-E-S-D-A-Y. Who prefers (gesture) Tuesdays (point to Tuesday)? Who prefers (gesture) Wednesdays (point to Wednesday)?

(Tabulate answers - usually as the week goes on, the days tend to get more popular!)

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(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)… is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

Look (gesture), is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Hot!/Cold!)

Class, is it hot (gesture) or VERY (gesture) hot (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot. (write and spell) V-E-R-Y hot.

If time permits, you might continue on, using the gestures that you have already established, to ask questions like “Who in the class prefers when it is hot? Who prefers when it is VERY hot?

Who prefers when it is cold? VERY cold?”

You can tabulate/record the numbers of students who respond to each option, either by counting and writing tally marks or a numeral, or by writing (and perhaps also spelling) students’ names.

You can ask who is happy/sad (using the faces you drew on the calendar) when it is hot, cold, very hot, etc, or on Mondays, Fridays, the weekend.

After about 10 to 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input (or longer in block classes), move to Scaffolded Oral Review.

True-False Quiz Today, we will begin using a slight variation on the Quick Quiz, a True-False Quiz.

Move to your Review Spot and ask a series of questions about what was just discussed.

Generally I ask between six and ten questions, or even more. But on the first days, you might ask only two or three, or even just one, depending on your class schedule.

You are advised to stick to literal review questions and not branch out into asking other questions.

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You should still be willing to give students the answer as you ask the question, with whatever “hints” students need, in the form of extra-linguistic information such as vocal inflection, gestures, pointing to visuals, and facial expressions.

After moving to the Review Spot, you will say: “OK, time for a review quiz. It is true (gesture thumbs up) and false (gesture thumbs down).”

Write the words for “true” and “false” in your language on the board, or have signs or other visual aids ready to use, or simply ask students, “Show me true, show me false” to help them learn and recognize the thumbsup and thumbs-down gesture you are using.

“Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh….

LOTS (gesture) of people….shhhh…. LOVE (gesture) Mondays….shhhhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…LOTS (gesture) of people LOVE (gesture) …shhhh….Mondays.”

(The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes, FALSE!” (gesture or use visual aid) “Class, do LOTS (gesture) of people LOVE (gesture) Mondays…or Fridays?”

(Students call out "Fridays!”)

“Yes, true (gesture). LOTS (gesture) of people in the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) Fridays.

Fridays are popular, class?”

(Students call out “Yes!” etc.)

“Yes, true (gesture). Fridays are popular.”

Repeat with more true-false questions if time permits.

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Write and Discuss The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. You will follow the same procedure as in Session One. Write and Discuss is truly a powerful, low, low-prep strategy that pays off BIG in student literacy, for very little investment on your part. It’s the ultimate win-win.If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed. See Session One for an example.

Today, you will most likely only write two or three sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are building the foundation in these first lessons. You will probably notice that even in the second lesson of the year, students are already more comfortable and Shared Writing (and the rest of the lesson framework) goes more smoothly, with less need to explain/give directions in English.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this: Write: Fridays are Say: Fridays are popular? Or Fridays are VERY (gesture) POPULAR? Students: VERY POPULAR! Say: Yes, Fridays are…(writing and spelling in French) V-E-R-Y-space-P-O-P-U-L-A-R. Write: The date today is Say: Is the date today Monday or Friday?

Class: Monday!

Say: Yes, the date today is…(writing and spelling) M-O-N-D-A-Y, A-U-G-U-S-T Reading/Recycling: Fridays are very popular. The date today is Monday, August….

Say: Is the date today August 27 or is the date today August 28?

Students: August 27!

Say: Yes, the date today is August 27.

Reading/Recycling: Fridays are very popular. The date today is Monday, August 27.

Write: The class Say: Class, do a LOT (gesture) of people like (gesture) Mondays?

Class: NO! Say: Does the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) Mondays? Is Monday popular?

Students: NOOOOOOO! Write: does NOT like Mondays.

Reading/Recycling: Fridays are very popular. The date today is Monday, August 27. The class does NOT like Mondays.

Continue on to write about the weather, if time permits.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. You will continue to use the three “Go-To” strategies (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits).

Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) Fridays are very popular. The date today is Monday, August 27. The class does NOT like Mondays. The class prefers Fridays. One person likes Mondays. Feng prefers Mondays.

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: Fridays…are…very…popular…the date…of…today…is…the…27…August…Monday. The class…like/does/not?) (sensing confusion, you circle “n’”) “This word means ‘not’ in French (write “not” in English or draw a “no” sign) Let’s back up to here and go again.”

(Note that you DID NOT explain the WHOLE ne…pas concept of negation in French. This is POP-UP grammar, which should be fast. There will be many more opportunities to teach all about French negation in other examples and lessons). (class reads: The class…not…like…?) (sensing confusion, you circle “pas”) “This word ALSO means ‘not’ in French (write “not” in English or draw a “no” sign). In French we have to say NE and PAS, to say what is one word in English (not). Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: The class…not…like…?) (continue in this fashion.)

Grammar Discussion “Well done. Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

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To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) “We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

“Is this French class…or Spanish class?” (the class responds: French!)

“Yes, this is French class. Is the month August…or is the month February?” (the class responds: August!)

“Yes, the month is August. Is the date today August 21…or is the date today August 22?” (the class responds: August 22!)

“Yes, the date is August 22.”

(Continue in this fashion, time permitting.)

True-False Quiz Walk to your Quiz Spot.

“Quiz time. You will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One.”(hold up one finger) “True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. LOTS (gesture) of people….shhhh…. LOVE (gesture) Mondays….shhhhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)… shhh…LOTS (gesture) of people LOVE (gesture) … shhhh….Mondays.”

Continue on if time permits. At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 4

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

All Levels: state six facts about SLA (Second Language Acquisition) in a creative way Notes/Prep: The project that I use in the example lesson is the brochures project; you might also simply have students make a collection of memes, and not the complete brochures, if you want to shorten/simplify the product they create, in the interest of time. You can also have them make posters instead of brochures, perhaps having them work with a partner or in a small group of three students.

To prepare for the lesson in Session 5, Card or Slide Talk, you might want to go ahead and tell the students to upload (for Slide Talk) or think about (to sketch on a card for Card Talk) a place they like to go. You can leave this very general (simply “a place you like to go”) or ask for more specific information (in the example in Session 5, I will ask students to upload images of a place they like to go that you can walk to from our school.

You could also ask them for places they like to go in summer, or places they would like to go, perhaps a place they would like to go to speak the course language, or places they like to study, or places they like to go to have fun.)

Continue to greet the students in English, review where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and they need to work together to focus and listen because that is the best way to help yourself and everyone else be successful in this class. Tell them that today is a special day. Note: you will not be following the usual daily instructional framework today, as it is a special lesson, which is why this lesson is scheduled for the third or fourth session, so that you can use the first lessons to establish the “flow” of the daily instructional framework before briefly deviating from the “standard operating procedure” in this session.

Tell your students that they will first read in the language (French in the example lesson), then do a quick calendar check-in, and then you will teach them a lesson on SLA (Second Language Acquisition) in English (or the class’s other shared stronger language, if you teach advanced students who can handle this), after which they will make a mini-project to show what they learned and share with others.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, you might want to do that before you begin this lesson. If so, please see the HR Manual in the Appendices for the Videographer job description and some guidance on how to interview and hire for the student jobs.

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Hand out (or project/display) a Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or re-read a Shared Writing text from the first lesson(s) of the year.

Then, share the lesson objective, if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and have them give the signal (or give it yourself if no one has yet to volunteer for the job), and begin filming, and then take a nice deep calming breath and begin speaking in the language.

German Beginner Cognate Reading

Find That Cognate These Reading Workshop example texts use the cognate-heavy topic of languages, with varying degrees of difficulty for various levels of classes. You might here in the fourth lesson (or the third lesson for block classes) use more challenging texts with your upper-level classes, if they can handle the additional challenge.

See the notes in Session One for more recommendations on choosing leveled texts.

German Intermediate Cognate Reading

German Advanced Cognate Reading

In the sample lesson, I use the French beginner reading below.

French Beginner Cognate Reading

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As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use this standard black text. The words that are said in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me and many teachers in the US) are written in this color.

Now we will move on to the lesson procedures. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed: “Let’s read this text about “The Business of Languages”. Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates, the words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

(If you have a Videographer, have them begin the video.)

“I will read in French and remember that your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand. Shawn, let’s go!”

(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(Read the text aloud in the language.)

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘affaires internationales’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, international business in English, is international business.

I-N-T-E-R-N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-space-B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. International business.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, affaires internationales est international business. eeeeey - ennn - tayyy uhhhh - errr - ennn - ahhh - tayyy - eeeey - ohhh - ennnn - ahhhh - ellll - espace - bayyy - euuuu- etc. (saying letters in French). Affaires internationales.”)

(Repeat with another cognate, or move on to open-ended questions as explained below.)

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point to the word cognate in the readings or write it on the board with translation)?”

“Can you read any other words?”

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point)?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, native in English, is native. N-A-T-I-V-E.” Page 149

Take a few more cognates, either by asking what a word is in English or by taking what volunteers noticed. If there are not many volunteers, or if no one wants to speak up, you can just ask the questions yourself. After a few minutes, you move into the Guided Oral Input, which - because today is special - will be a very short, two to five minute calendar discussion.

Small Talk (Short Calendar and Weather Check-In) Move to the calendar to transition to the Guided Oral Input.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…August 28 (jot “28” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 29 (jot “29”)?”

(Some kids call out “28”) “Yes, class, today is August…28 (write 28 on the calendar).”

“Class, is today Monday (point)…or Tuesday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Monday” ) “Yes, class, today is Tuesday (point). Tuesday (point), August (point) 28 (point).”

(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)… is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

Look (gesture), is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Hot!/Cold!)

Class, is it hot (gesture) or VERY (gesture) hot (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot. (write and spell) V-E-R-Y hot.

Note: You will most likely only ask a couple of questions in the short time allotted for Guided Oral Input today, as you will spend most of the lesson on the Second Language Acquisition mini-lecture and projects, as described below.

Special Beginning-the-Year Lessons on Second Language Acquisition and Why Study Languages?

This lesson is designed to be delivered in the class’s stronger shared language, if applicable, which, for me, is English. You can, with more advanced classes, who have had at least a solid year of experience with communication-based language teaching, present some or all of this information in the course language. And in classes where there is not a stronger shared language, such as ESOL classes, you can present this information in the course language, perhaps in a simplified way, especially with beginners.

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If you do share a stronger language with the class, even for upper-level students, it is recommended that you preface the lesson in the stronger shared language with a thorough overview of what you will present. Most students, unless they have already been taught this information in previous courses, will not have very extensive background knowledge of these concepts. Thus, it is recommended that you present the information first in the stronger shared language, or even exclusively in the shared language, to ensure that your class understands these important, foundational concepts for why your class operates the way it does.

Investing a day or two in explaining your approach to the students, and having them use that information to create products, such as brochures, posters, or videos, to teach it to others, will help your students to develop a positive attitude towards your approach to teaching languages. Many students and families can be resistant to this way of learning. However, I have found that with Stepping Stones, which provides a framework to use the language to explore content-based topics such as history, environmental challenges, cultural products and practices, then students and families tend to become calmer, because the learning becomes more visible.

You might choose to use the Visual Lecture that I provide here, to scaffold this information in the course language or the stronger shared language. But the first part should ABSOLUTELY be provided in the stronger shared language, if possible, so that no one is confused as to what you are yammering on about.

(This is a good rule of thumb no matter what, in any lesson; set the context and purpose for learning in the stronger shared language, if you can, so that everyone is comfortable knowing what they are supposed to be learning/doing/accomplishing.)

The convention in this book is to use black font when you are speaking in the course language and in a lighter color when you are speaking in the stronger shared language. However, in the interest of readability, since this lesson is special, and, for most classes, will be conducted in the stronger shared language, the font is black, even though you will most likely be speaking in the class’s stronger shared language. If your advanced students can handle this information in the course language, you will most likely want to simplify/modify the content below, as it was “pitched” at a level that students in grades six and above can generally comprehend in their stronger shared language. If you teach younger people, you will also need to modify the contents, even if you are speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, to adapt to your younger students’ developmental needs.

You can find a graphic version of this lesson in the Appendices. The slides pictured in the following section are from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff).

“Let’s look at some research and science about how we develop, or acquire, the ability to speak a language.

Many of us came to French class with ideas of how a language class works, because of classes we have taken in the past, or because of what we have heard from our siblings or parents or friends.

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Lots of French classes focus on memorizing vocabulary words and filling out worksheets to practice the language. You might have noticed in the last couple of days that we are not doing much of that kind of learning in this class. The reason why is because I have designed this course to align with the latest research in how we best learn how to communicate in a language.

So many people say that they took language classes in high school or college, and they never learned how to USE the language to do what languages are meant to do — communicate, make friends, learn things, and entertain ourselves. This class is designed to teach you to USE French.

I have spent a lot of time learning how to teach a language so that my students can USE it, because I love French so much that it makes me sad to think that anyone would take years and years of French and not be able to use this beautiful language to communicate with the fascinating people all around the world that speak French. It just makes me so sad to think about that.

I love being able to communicate in French, and in Spanish, and in English, and I want the same for you.

It is so fun to speak in another language, and I want you to have that fun. It is so cool to meet people from all over and be able to talk to them in their own language, and I want that for you. It is so fun to be able to watch videos and listen to music and read books and articles from around the world, and I want you to be able to do that.

I am so excited to share the French language with you, and I want you to understand how I have designed this class to support your French language development.

Today I want to teach you about how we acquire languages, and why this class is designed the way it is.

I will tell you about some brain science and how it applies to your work in this class.

At the end of class, we will brainstorm some “slogans” and make brochures to teach our families (or, teachers, you might choose to have them make posters to hang in the school, or both) some facts about language acquisition and what we are going to be accomplishing this year in class.

I am so excited to offer you a cutting-edge, modern, twenty-first century language class that will help you to achieve more in the French language than I was able to achieve in high school myself.

Language teaching has changed a lot since I was in high school, and I am just thrilled to be teaching a class designed to give you true success in the language!

(At this point, you might switch into the course language, or continue on in the stronger shared language. You could also do a hybrid approach in which you explain the concept in the stronger shared language, and then re-explain in the course language. The images in the example can be found in the Cycle One Phase One materials. In the example, the images are in English. You can find this presentation on our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff)).

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Here is a person.

They want to learn French.

They want to be able to speak French, and talk to other people.

They want to be able to listen to music in French, watch videos in French, and movies in French.

And they want to be able to write in French, and read in French.

Maybe one day they want to live in a French-speaking culture. Here are some examples of places where French is widely spoken: France, the Hexagon, the mothership, Sénégal, Belgium, Côte d’Ivoire, and many other parts of Africa, Canada, especially Québec, French Polynesia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc, etc.

And this person wants to use French naturally, easily, without having to think too much. When they can use a language naturally, sometimes people say they can “speak from the heart.” We can think about WHAT we want to say, and HOW we want to say it, and not the WORDS and RULES to use.

When you speak English, or your other stronger language(s), you can speak from the heart. And that is what I want for you in French.

So, when we learn with our brains, we can learn the rules and memorize words.

But if all we know is rules, then when we try to speak from the heart, we have to think first, about the words and rules. That slows us down. It makes us feel awkward when we speak.

That’s what happened to me in France when I was 18. Which was SUPERsurprising to me cause I made all As in French in high school. I loved it. I was super-interested in the rules, and super-good at memorizing vocabulary words. Not to brag…we all have our weird talents in school. Mine is languages. Not math…you’ve seen me try to count…

Anyways, I was really into French and it just came easy to me, and I really did well on all the vocabulary and grammar tests, like the verbs test and the plural adjectives test…so of course, I thought I would make a lot of friends in France. cause I was SUCH a little French GENIUS! Makes sense, right?

But then I was so sad - and SHOCKED! - when I was in France, because I could not talk! Everyone was talking so fast, I could not understand them. In my French classes, we had not really TALKED a lot.

So, this was all new to me and I was so nervous and awkward and slow when I tried to talk to them. I cried a lot!

I still loved French, though, even though at that time it really wasn’t exactly loving me back…and I still wanted to be a French teacher. First I thought, “Well, I guess I need to figure out how to actually Page 153

LEARN to SPEAK FRENCH, huh? And I thought, I want to know how to teach my students so that they can USE French, and make friends, and not be sad and slow and awkward.

So, I learned more about teaching. And now my goal for you is to learn to USE French. And the way I learned is best for that, based on the science of Second Language Acquisition, is to use French all the time as much as we can, anyway -in class.

So, basically, we are learning not just with our heads, like I did in my high school classes, but with our hearts, too. Now, of course, we are also learning with our brains. But there is actually a special part of the brain that is designed to acquire language. To help us USE the language, to help us communicate.

This part is separate from the part that learns the rules. And these two parts of our brains run on different inputs. And they have different functions.

The “heart” part of the brain, the part that we use when we are thinking about WHAT we want to say and HOW we want to express ourselves, the part that lets us be ourselves in the language, and express our personalities, and feel free and natural and NOT awkward and slow, runs on MESSAGES. This part is technically called the “language acquisition device” and it is a special part of being human. It is what lets us learn our first language from our families and not have to do worksheets, or take tests, or use flashcards, and we can still just start talking, even when we are little kids like one and two years old.

The “language acquisition device” runs on MESSAGES. Like what people say to us - like when I talk to you in French - and what we read or watch or listen to online. When we understand messages in the language, this special part of our brain takes those messages and — almost like magic — it builds a new language system inside of us.

Then when we want to talk or write, we use that system and language just pops out of us, like it does when we speak English, or whatever languages we are strong in.

Because I want you to be able to USE French, I want to feed that system — your “speaking from the heart” system — your “language acquisition device” — and the way to do that is to give you lots and lots of French. So we will talk in French. We will read in French. We will write together in French. We will watch videos in French, listen to music in French.

It will just be French, French, French, for most of the time in here. Just basically one big old French-a-thon.

It’s just the best, most efficient use of the time we have in class.

The awesome thing about this system — the “speaking from the heart” or “language acquisition device” is that we ALL can do it. You do not have to be super-smart; you do not have to even really TRY, and in fact, some people say that you do not even have to WANT to learn the language (even though, of course, as a French Page 154

teacher, I want to get you to be interested in learning more and continuing on with languages in general and especially French!). All you have to do is participate in activities in class to hear and read and communicate in French.

And, like magic, by understanding French, your language acquisition device will build the language inside of you.

We can all do it, no matter who we are. No matter how good we are at school…every single person can be an awesome French student and speaker…the proof is that we all speak another language already.

We have all already proven that we can acquire the ability to speak and read a language. So, the good news is that the process of acquiring the ability to communicate in French is just the same.

All you have to do is relax, and listen, and participate in the activities we do in class, and you will make lots of progress. It’s just what your brain is designed to do.

But, the brainy part of us, the part that learns the rules, it also has a role to play. One thing that the brainy part of us can do is help us edit our work.

Another thing that we use our brains for in language is planning how to write better.

We will be learning things like how to organize paragraphs, and how to write better stories, and how to spell things and make our language sound as good as we can. Another thing that it can do is look for patterns in the language that we hear and read, and some people find this super-interesting.

In fact, there is a whole science called linguistics, that studies how languages are put together and how they work — the spelling, the forms of the language, all that. It’s a really interesting field, and maybe some of you will get interested in linguistics and study more later.

So, we will also be using our brains, the thinking part that runs on rules and thinking about the language, in class every day, to look at what we write, and to notice and learn things about French spelling and how the language is put together, and how it is different from English, and how it is similar to English. This is actually super-fascinating to me, and I really love thinking about languages.

But this is not the main focus of this class. The MAIN focus of this class is to use the language, so that we can develop the ability to speak from the heart, and not have to think about it so much, and be able to express ourselves. You will find that your abilities to express yourself in French grow rapidly, and they will grow faster the more you listen and read the language.

We will not be having tests and quizzes on vocabulary words and facts about the language. We will have assessments that grade you on your ability to understand French, and to start writing and speaking. At first you will not be able to write or say much.

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But the more you listen to French and read French, the more fuel you will be giving to the “speak from the heart” system, the “language acquisition device”, and the faster you will be able to say more, write more, and use more French.

Of course, I want you to listen and read attentively in class. But you might find that you are motivated to seek out more French in your out-of-school life, too.

The good news is that anything you do to entertain yourself in English, you can also do to entertain yourself in French — and get more fuel, those messages in the language, that your language acquisition device uses to build the French language in your heads!

There are many ways to get more listening and reading in French — listening to French-language music, YouTube videos with the subtitles on, books like the ones in our class library, reading French articles online about things you are interested in.

We will be using as much French as we can in class, but you will develop faster the more you listen and read French. So, if you want to know more ways to find things to watch, listen to, or read in French, just ask me and I will be happy to hook you up.

The Mini-Project Now, if you want to do the mini-project, you will have the class brainstorm slogans that they can use in their brochures or posters. I usually have my students brainstorm six to eight slogans together, and then ask them to use one slogan per section in their brochure, or - if I do a poster option - two or three slogans on their poster.

I also ask them to include two or more additional facts per slogan, so that they are processing the information in their own words, which helps them to internalize and understand the information. The rubric that I use, and a sample project, are below.

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My goals in giving a lesson on SLA are to teach my students why this class operates the way it does, so that they can relax into the French communication in class without wondering why we are not doing more traditional vocabulary and grammar work, which is what they might have envisioned in a language class.

I also want them to experience the excitement that I feel, when I teach others about how wonderful it is that we now have tools and strategies that can catapult them into high levels of proficiency in the language, when they share their posters or brochures with others and teach them about this fascinating (at least to me) information on how our brains acquire the language.

Communicating with Families I have had great success with having the students, after the research and rationale for the course is presented to them, work together as a class to make a class list on the board or overhead projector of the facts they learned.

Then I like to lead a class brainstorm to list six to ten “slogans” on SLA (to summarize their learning) and then use those slogans to design flyers, posters, or brochures to take home and share with their families.

I ask the students to choose a slogan as the title of their brochure, flyer, or poster, and to add four to six facts that they learned from the talk, to share with their families. Some of my favorite past slogans have been, “Babies Don’t Take Tests” and “Working Hard is Hardly Working” and, my personal all-time favorite,

" Spanish is LIT! " Man, you just gotta love seventh graders!

A sample letter home is included in the Appendix “Home-School Connections.” I make sure to get the letter signed so that if anyone challenges my grading system later in the year, I will have their signature to prove that I communicated the expectations at the start of the year.

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Instructional Session 5

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner: write one or more words in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.)

Intermediate: a write sentences in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.)

Advanced: write one or more words in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.) and compare them to places in the francophone world Preparation You will need to have students provide images of places they know, to discuss in the Card Talk or Slide Talk. If you have not already done this, you will need to ask students to upload an image to your shared Slide Talk or sketch on a card, if you are using the original Card Talk variation.

Here is an example of Slide Talk from the materials in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff).

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Students will upload (for Slide Talk) or sketch on a card (for Card Talk) a place they like to go. You can leave this very general (simply “a place you like to go”) or ask for more specific information. In the example lesson, students to upload images of a place they like to go that you can walk to from our school. You could also ask them for places they like to go in summer, or places they would like to go, perhaps a place they would like to go to speak the course language, or places they like to study, or places they like to go to have fun.

Continue to greet the students in English, review where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and they need to work together to focus and listen because that is the best way to help yourself and everyone else be successful in this class. Tell them that each day the first activity of class will be reading and that today you will read about information science, like computer programming and game design.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, you might want to do that before you begin this lesson. See the HR Manual for more information on this job.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from the first lesson(s) of the year.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and have them give the signal (or give it yourself if no one has yet to volunteer for the job), and begin filming if you are starting that today, and then begin speaking in the language.

Find That Cognate and Pronunciation Practice Project or distribute paper copies of a short text. The following Reading Workshop example texts use the cognate-heavy topic of computer-related terms, with varying degrees of difficulty for various levels of classes. You might use more challenging texts with your upper-level classes, if they have the reading skills to handle them.

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Italian Beginner Cognate Reading

See the notes in Session One for more recommendations on choosing leveled texts.

Italian Intermediate Cognate Reading

Italian Advanced Cognate Reading

In the sample lesson, I use the French beginner reading below.

French Beginner Cognate Reading

Now we will move on to the lesson procedures:. As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use this standard black text. The words that are said in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me and many teachers in the US) are written in this color.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed: “Let’s read this text about “Why Study Information Science”. Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates, the words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

(If you have a Videographer, have them begin the video.)

“I will read in French and remember that your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand. Shawn, let’s go!”

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(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(Read the text aloud in the language.)

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘revolutionized’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, revolutionized in English, is revolutionized. R-E-V-O-L-T-I-O-N-I-Z-E-D. Revolutionized.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, révolutionné est revolutionized. errr - uhhhh accent aigu- vayyyy - ohhh - elll etc. (saying letters in French). Révolutionné.”)

(Repeat with another cognate, or move on to open-ended questions as explained below.)

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point to the word cognate in the readings or write it on the board with translation)?”

“Can you read any other words?”

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (point)?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, technology in English, is technology.

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y.” Take a few more cognates, either by asking what a word is in English or by taking what volunteers noticed. If there are not many volunteers, or if no one wants to speak up, you can just ask the questions yourself. Then move on to Pronunciation Practice.

“Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

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“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ a little more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, beginning with a brief calendar check-in and then moving on to discuss students’ cards or slides.

Card Talk or Slide Talk (Locations) Move to the calendar to transition to the Guided Oral Input. For the rest of the year, it is suggested that you continue a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input, which (1) creates an opening/ transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities.

Please note that you will NOT want to continually ask the same questions as modeled in these example sessions; you can begin to ask students who thinks it will be hot tomorrow, or if they think it will rain, or what they are doing on the weekend or who is going to the pep assembly on Thursday.

All you need to do, if you want to start branching out, is make sure that you speak slowly, scaffold the words you say one at the time, giving special care to scaffold any new words that arise during these more detailed and personal conversations, perhaps using gestures, writing, drawing, pictures, or realia. Then, make sure to pause, with your hands physically on the visual support, as you silently sweep the room with your eyes to check for comprehension, and that you stick to one or two new topics in any given lesson.

So, if you ask who thinks it will be sunny tomorrow, and “tomorrow” is a new word, then you would most likely want to continue in that vein, and ask who thinks it will rain tomorrow and who thinks it might snow tomorrow and who thinks it will be cold tomorrow (because your class has had a good deal of input with the words :hot,” “rainy,” etc, and therefore the only really super-new word in this series of questions is “tomorrow”), instead of going farther afield in the conversation and starting to address another topic that would necessitate further new vocabulary (e.g. shifting to a discussion of activities and plans, if those would be new terms for your class).

The idea is not to just go all over the place willy-nilly with the conversation, but also not to only stick with the vocabulary that students already know. One or two new terms per calendar check-in is usually sufficient to maintain interest by introducing new topics of conversation, and as you move through the term with a brief calendar check-in on a regular basis, you will find that you are able to gradually develop a “bank” of words Page 164

that are familiar and allow the calendar discussion to get more and more interesting, varied, and authentic (in the sense that students will be able to discuss topics of actual interest in their lives using this discussion format.)

Below, you will find an example of a very basic calendar check-in using many of the same terms we have used in the previous sessions.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…August 27 (jot “27” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 28 (jot “23”)?”

(Some kids call out “27”) “Yes, class, today is August…27 (write 27 on the calendar).”

“Class, is today Friday (point)…or Monday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Monday” ) “Yes, class, today is Monday (point). Friday (point), August (point) 27 (point).”

(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)…is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Hot!/Cold!)

Class, is it hot (gesture) or VERY (gesture) hot (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot. (write and spell) V-E-R-Y hot.

Card Talk/Slide Talk Then, you will move on to the students’ cards or slides.

You will most likely not get through everyone’s card or slide in the lesson(s) you have scheduled for Card/ Slide Talk, and that is fine, because it tends to get rather boring, unless you have a small group or they are exceptionally interested in each other (which is definitely the case for some special groups). However, you can return to the cards throughout the month and even later in the year.

Card Talk For Card Talk, you will distribute to each student a piece of 8.5 x 11” card stock or plain paper. On this paper, have students write their names, or the name they want to be called in your class, in marker. Have them make a large, simple sketch of a location that they like (or a more specific location as described above).

As students work, it is a good idea to circulate and look for the first couple of cards that you will incorporate into the discussion, and also verify with students that you know what it is that they sketched, if there is any doubt in your mind what they intended to convey. When looking for the first cards to discuss, you are advised to look for students who appear to need extra attention to be included in the group, or students who have a Page 165

hard time focusing. Often, making these students “famous” for their cards can go a long way towards laying down positive relationships for the year.

It is best if you can find two or three students’ cards to talk about, beginning with one card and then rather quickly adding the second and perhaps the third into the conversation. The best way to find these cards is to look for two or three students who draw the same thing (e.g. a café) or closely-related things that are different (e.g. a café and a restaurant).

Although you will have the cards pre-selected in your mind, you begin by pretending that you just happened to select the first student’s card. You will want to act as if the fact on this card is the most special, fascinating information you have learned in years. Ask the class to look at the card, using the gesture for “look”.

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Announce to the class that the student likes the activity or item on the card, using the gestures you have established for “like” or “love.” Note that in the example below, the teacher has asked students to sketch an activity they like; you will ask them for a location that they like, but the procedures are the same.

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It is a good idea to quickly move on to polling the rest of the class to see who else likes that same location.

You can build suspense and emotional engagement by good-naturedly asking the students whose cards you are discussing to look at the class as they have their hands raised, and coach them to react in mock astonishment, saying things like, “Sean and Jeannette, look at the class! The café is very popular! 1, 2, 3, …

14 people love the café too!” or “Kelvin, look at the class! Only one other person likes the café!”

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Even if the rest of the class did not draw anything having to do with the topic of the first three cards, they will most likely have an opinion on the topic of the cards. You can ask who likes, loves, does not like, and hates the location from the first two or three students’ cards. You might need to assign a gesture for these various feelings as you discuss.

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You can ask follow-up questions of the original students or those who raise their hands, perhaps finding out the name of their favorite café, or their favorite food there or their favorite soccer team, or if anyone in the class is on their team.

Please be advised to clearly establish meaning whenever you question an individual student, especially at the beginning of the year. One easy and supportive way to do that is to almost-ask a question of the individual student, then stop yourself and ask the class in general, in English, “What am I asking Kelvin?” and then repeat the question to Kelvin once the class has verified the meaning of the question. This ensures that the individual student whom you are addressing is not embarrassed by not understanding the question. See the illustrations above for examples of this very valuable teaching move.

At any time that the first topic begins to feel “flat” it is advised to move on to another topic by selecting another card. If you do this with a light touch, no one will ever suspect that the discussion was beginning to grow stale. Simply replace the first students’ cards, perhaps have the class applaud for them, look around the room, and with as dramatic a flourish as you can muster, pick up another student’s “fascinating” card.

You will probably only have time in Guided Oral Input on this first day to talk about one or two students’ cards.

You can return to this session in your next class, to talk about more students’ cards. In fact, Card/Slide Talk can easily last three or four class periods (or two block periods), especially in those good-natured classes that really enjoy talking about each other.

For more details on the Slide Talk variation, including graphics that show an example of what it might look like as you use the students’ images to discuss their favorite locations (or whatever topic you chose for them to submit), please see Session Eight.

Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. You will introduce a new review strategy today: Finish My Sentence. This is a super-easy, no-prep Scaffolded Oral Review strategy that is also super-fun. You simply tell the class, in the stronger shared language, “I will say a fact about what we just learned and you will finish my sentence. The class will get a point if most of you are still talking in French after six seconds (or some other number of seconds you think is appropriate; upper-level students will be able to speak for longer)” Then you proceed to retell information from the Guided Oral Input, ideally with a visual aid to help support their comprehension. But you do not say a whole sentence. You say the first part of a sentence in the course language, and then with an “expectant” gesture and vocal intonation, you invite students to call out, in the course language, possible endings to the statement, as you silently count on your fingers to show the seconds going by, and perhaps gesturing to them using the “say more” gesture (which you will also have Page 170

students use in the new Student Application and Assessment strategy explained in this session, the Question and Answer Game).

For example, you might say, in French, pointing to a slide you discussed, “Dazhia likes the café because…” and then gesture to the class to speak, and begin counting silently on your fingers.

Students might call out, “study” or “coffee” or “talking to friends”, or whatever phrases they remember from the input, or can produce on their own. You might have just a few kids call out, or you might have a bunch of people calling out a bunch of different phrases.

You then re-state the sentence again, with one or two of the phrases you heard students calling out added to the end. Then you continue on to more sentences, restating each one after you hear the suggested endings that your students call out.

You might, for additional review, cycle back through all the newly-finished sentences each time you make a new sentence with the class. This builds in a lot of repetition and gives the kids the satisfaction of hearing their ideas put into the instruction that day in class.

Generally I say between three and five sentence starters, or even more. But on the first days, you might say only three or four, or even just one or two, depending on your class schedule.

After moving to the Review Spot, you will say: “OK, we are going to play a game called ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact from what we just learned, in French, and then you will all speak in French as much as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts that we learned, or add on other facts that you know. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point. If you cannot keep talking in French for the whole six seconds, I will get a point.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) The café is very…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “popular, the school cafeteria not popular” or “popular, Dazhia likes café cafeteria NOT popular,” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Six! Good job, a point for the class!”

(Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Question Two. At the café, we like to…”

(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

Repeat, if time permits.

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Write and Discuss The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. You will follow the same procedure as in the previous sessions. If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed. See Session One for an example.

You will most likely only write three or four sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are building the foundation in these first lessons. You will probably notice that, because most of the lesson components have been repeated several times in the first sessions of the year, you are already seeing less need to explain/give directions in English.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Write: The Café Say: The café is popular? Or the café is VERY (gesture) POPULAR? Students: VERY POPULAR! Say: Yes, the café is…(writing and spelling in French) V-E-R-Y P-O-P-U-L-A-R. Write: Dazhia likes Say: Does Dazhia like the café?

Class: Yes! The café!

Say: Yes, Dazhia…(writing and spelling) L-I-K-E-S…the café.

Reading/Recycling: The café is very popular. Dazhia likes the café.

Say: Do 14 people like the café or do two people like the café?

Students: Fourteen!

Say: Yes, fourteen people like the café.

Write: Fourteen people like the café.

Reading/Recycling: The café is very popular. Dazhia likes the café. Fourteen people like the café.

Write: We like Say: Class, do people like to study at the café?

Class: Yes! Write: to study at the café.

Say: Class, do people like to talk to their friends at the café?

Class: Yes! Write: to talk to our friends, too.

Reading/Recycling: The café is very popular. Dazhia likes the café. Fourteen people like the café. We like to study at the café and talk to our friends, too.

Time permitting, you might write more or less.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. You will continue to use the three “Go-To” strategies (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits).

Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) The café is very popular. Dazhia likes the café.

Fourteen people like the café. We like to study at the café and talk to our friends, too.

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: the…café…is…very…popular…Dazhia…likes…the…café…fourteen…people…like…) (seeing a “teachable moment”, circle the ending on the verb “like”) “These letters tell us that there is more than one person. See when it is just Dazhia, these letters are not there. Let’s back up to here and go again.”

(Note that you DID NOT explain the WHOLE concept of the various persons of the verb conjugations in French. This is POP-UP grammar, which should be fast. There will be many more opportunities to teach all about French conjugations in other examples and lessons. (class reads: fourteen…people…like…the…café…we?…they?…like…) (sensing confusion, you circle “on”) “This word means ‘people’ or ‘we’ in French (write “we” in English). Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: fourteen…people…like…the…café…we…like…studying…at…café?…) (sensing confusion, you circle “au”) “This word means ‘at the’ (write “at the” in English). We say that with two words, but here in French it is just one word. It is actually two words squashed together. “À” means “at” or “in” and “le” means “the” and “au” is “à” plus “le.” (Write “à + le = au”.). Let’s back up to here and go again.” (continue in this fashion.)

Grammar Discussion “Well done. Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

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To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) “We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

“Is the café very popular…or the school cafeteria?” (the class responds: café!)

“Yes, the café is very popular. Is the school cafeteria popular?” (the class responds: No!) “No, the school cafeteria is NOT very popular. Who in the class prefers the school cafeteria?” (raised hands, or none) “Wow, class, one, two, three…only three people prefer the school cafeteria. Who prefers the café?” (raised hands, or none) “Wow, class, one, two, three (counting)…twelve people prefer the café.”

Continue in this fashion, time permitting.

Written Quick Quiz In this variation on the Quick Quiz, you will ask students to write their answers to the review questions instead of giving whole-class oral responses as they have in the first lessons.

I allow my first-year, and often even my second-year students, to write their answers in any way that demonstrates comprehension of the material. So, I tell them that they can write one word in French, or a phrase or sentence in French, and their points on the quiz would be the same no matter what. With upperlevel classes, you can ask them to respond in sentences or paragraphs, if they are ready for that challenge. It often helps, for all levels, to have the Shared Writing text still visible so that students can refer back to it, to get words, phrases, etc. to use in their answers. This is not cheating; it is built into the strategy. If students are referring back to the Shared Writing text, comprehending what they read there, and using the words to formulate their own responses, they are actually just processing the written input again, and using it in a new way for a new purpose. This is comprehension-based, communicative language teaching at its best. We want to structure class in such a way as to encourage, require, and reward students’ interaction with the input, and this is simply a way to do that, and also to get a written work sample that is easy to grade and can give you data for your gradebook.

You might want to assure your students that, even though they are writing in the language, you are only interested in their having the correct information, not in their spelling or grammar. This takes off the pressure and makes writing in French seem like just a fun challenge. Also, it aligns to the ACTFL performance Page 174

indicators and proficiency guidelines, because an Intermediate Low and Intermediate Mid writer will still have major patterns of errors, which might make their speech and writing difficult to comprehend from time to time.

We grade these in class, to make my job easier and also to provide more repetitions of the questions and answers. If your school allows it, I recommend having students switch papers. If your school does not allow peer assessment, for privacy reasons, then you can have students grade their own work. If you feel that cheating would be a problem, you can have students put away the writing implement they used to take the quiz, and use a colored pen or marker to grade themselves. The procedure I recommend for grading the quizzes in class is explained below.

Here is a possible way that the Quick Quiz might go at the end of the lesson example.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Please note that, even for a written quiz, it is highly recommended that you still use gestures, facial expressions, or even walk to the board or Shared Writing text, to point out visuals that might make the questions more comprehensible.

“OK, time for a final check. You will listen to the question TWO TIMES. You will NOT answer aloud; write a word, a phrase, or a sentence in French to give the correct answer. Spelling does NOT count; you will get an A if you can show the correct answer, in French, with any kind of spelling that you think is best, as long as it shows that you know the answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, the café …. shhhhh…. the café is very popular…shhhh…or the school cafeteria…..shhhhh….is very popular…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! The café is very popular….shhh …. or the school cafeteria is very popular…shhhh?”

“Number Two. (hold up one finger) Class, the café …. shhhhh…. fourteen people like the café…shhhh…or fourteen people like the school cafeteria…..shhhhh….? Shhhhh! Fourteen people like the café….shhh …. or fourteen people like the school cafeteria…shhhh?”

Continue in this manner, perhaps asking three to five total questions, making sure to leave about five minutes at the end of class to grade them.

Grading the quizzes in class provides immediate feedback and validation to students on their listening comprehension, and also more repetitions of the language used in the quiz. I simply ask the questions again, and the class calls out the answer and marks their paper or their partner’s paper correct or incorrect. After we grade our papers, I ask the students to write 4/5 or 5/5 or 6/7 or 7/7 or whatever their partner scored, at the top of the paper, to help facilitate my grading using Shawna’s Grading Trick, discussed later in this session.

I really like to ask my class, before they hand the papers back to their partner, to raise their hand if their partner scored 7/7 or 6/6 or 100%. When almost all of the hands go up, I praise the class profusely, saying what smart students they obviously are. Of course, they are simply succeeding at a task that I have engineered for their success. But, it is very motivational to celebrate our success in this way. Asking students to “brag” on their partner’s paper, and not on their own once they have it back, is a way to let the “too cool for school” crowd celebrate academic success too. Many students would hesitate or even choose not to raise their hand when “bragging” on their own work, for cultural reasons or because that’s just not part of how they Page 175

see themselves as a learner. But most kids like to celebrate others’ success, so usually the partners’ hands shoot up proudly to brag on their partner’s work, as if they had something to do with this amazing achievement by simply grading it!

Having students raise their hands also sends a message to anyone who is not making 100s on their formative listening quizzes because they were not listening attentively to the 12 to 16 minutes of Guided Oral Input: everyone else can do it. Seeing the class’s general level of success can spur such students to listen more carefully in the future, because they see that, for most of their peers, that led to stellar grades on the review quiz.

These review quizzes are, in fact, so easy to “ace” and so highly-engineered for student success that they are an excellent diagnostic tool for formative instructional decisions on your part. If a student or a small group of students consistently score low on the first two or three quizzes, and the class as a whole is consistently scoring high, you can rearrange the class’s seating to bring them closer to you so that you can more easily monitor the reasons for their low comprehension scores.

I recommend that you move the entire class around when making seating changes, even if it only with the intention of bring one single student closer to the areas that you use for Guided Oral Input instruction and your “Review Spot” where you conduct the daily oral review. If you move a single student, especially one who already feels inadequate because they are getting low scores on formative assessments, it sends a harmful message to that student and can make them feel ashamed in front of the entire class.

If the entire class is consistently scoring lower than 100%, which, for me means less than 85% or so of the students, then you want to think about what you are doing as the teacher that could be improved. Perhaps the class is consistently distracted during the Guided Oral Input, in which case you will want to review the chapter on classroom management, and the recommendations on going SLOW. If your students struggle with this written Quick Quiz, you might examine the comprehensibility of your speech during Guided Oral Input. You might adjust by perhaps reducing your speed, or reducing the amount of information you are attempting to convey during the input, or adding more visual scaffolding, or recycling more frequently through previously-established information, or asking more frequent whole-class questions to check for understanding during the input. You might use more gestures and teach them more explicitly, saying, ”X (gesture as you say X) means Y. Show me X (gesture as you say X)”. For example, “Regarde (gesture) means looks. Show me regarde (gesture).

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 6

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.)

Intermediate: say two or more sentences in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.)

Advanced: say a paragraph in French to describe places that people in our class like, using sensory details (e.g. describing the weather - what you can see, hear, feel - hot, cold, sunny, rainy, etc.) and compare them to places in the francophone world

Preparation Prepare a series of images for the Visual Survey. This is basically a series of images about a topic, which you will describe/discuss, and then a “voting slide” which shows all four of the images so that students can vote on their favorite. You can also download pre-made Visual Surveys from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff).

Generally, I find that either four or eight images is the best number. That way, I can make a series of four images, and then a voting slide, as shown below. If I have eight images, then I would have two sets of four images and two separate voting slides. Sometimes I like to do a “runoff vote” between the winner of the first voting slide and the winner from the second one, to find the class’s “ultimate” favorite image.

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Continue to greet the students in English, review where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that in this class we will be communicating a good deal in the language and they need to work together to focus and listen because that is the best way to help yourself and everyone else be successful in this class. Tell them that each day the first activity of class will be reading and that today you will read about information science, like computer programming and game design.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, you might want to do that before you begin this lesson. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on this job.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from the first lesson(s) of the year.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and have them give the signal (or give it yourself if no one has yet to volunteer for the job), and begin filming if you are starting that today, and then begin speaking in the language.

Find That Cognate and Pronunciation Practice See the notes in the previous sessions for detailed instructions on how you might conduct this Reading Workshop strategy.

Distribute or display the text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

“Let’s read this text about “Sports on YouTube France”.

Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates, the words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

(If you have a Videographer, have them begin the video.)

“I will read in French and remember that your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand. Shawn, let’s go!”

(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

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(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(Read the text aloud in the language.)

(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘practice a sport’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, practice a sport in English, is practice a sport. P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E-space-A-space-S-P-O-R-T. Practice a sport.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, practiquent un sport est practice a sport. payy - arrrr - ahhh - sayyy - etc. (saying letters in French). Practiquent un sport.”)

(Repeat with another cognate, or move on to the pronunciation practice as explained below.)

“Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ a little more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, beginning with a brief calendar check-in and then moving on to discuss the slides or images you prepared for the Visual Survey.

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Visual Survey (Locations) Move to the calendar to transition to the Guided Oral Input. For the rest of the year, it is suggested that you continue a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input, which (1) creates an opening/ transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…August 30 (jot “30” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 31 (jot “31”)?”

(Some kids call out “30”) “Yes, class, today is August…30 (write 30 on the calendar).”

“Class, is today Thursday (point)…or Friday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Thursday” ) “Yes, class, today is Thursday (point), August (point) 30 (point).”

(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)…is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Hot!/Cold!)

Class, is it hot (gesture) or VERY (gesture) hot (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot. (write and spell) V-E-R-Y hot.

Visual Survey The setup and execution of this strategy is quite simple. Just paste four images into a slide or document that you can project, with each image labeled A, B, C, or D, or 1, 2, 3, and 4, or (like the examples provided) with an icon or picture of related vocabulary. You might choose to use images of culturally-relevant items, or other vocabulary that you need your kids to know (foods, or articles of clothing, for example), so that students get a little additional exposure to these terms.

You will talk about each image to describe it, as you would in a Picture Talk (a widely-used input strategy), perhaps bouncing back and forth from Page 180

one image to another, comparing and contrasting, and asking questions. Then you vote on which image is the class’s favorite, asking “A, B, C, or D,” or using the icons (e.g. “the canoe”) and the class votes on their favorite.

For upper-level students can “angle” the question towards certain language structures that you want to reinforce. For example, you can project four images of various school supplies, and ask which one is the Number One Can’t-Live-Without school supply (e.g. “Which is the most important”), or which one will get you in the most trouble in math if you do not have it, or which one your parents would be the most upset if you lost or broke and had to ask to get replaced. You might also, in order to elicit higher-order thinking, ask them to choose the two that go best together and lead them in a discussion of why they would and would not go together.

Working with the example Visual Survey might sound like this: “We are going to look at a series of images that show different places that people like to go to have fun. I will describe them to you in French, and then you will vote on what kind of place you like best. We will write about the class’s favorite place later in the lesson.”

“Look (gesture) at this picture. It is a stadium (place your hand on the projected image).”

“Is it a big (gesture) stadium or a small (gesture) stadium?”

(Students call out, “Big!”) “Yes it it a big (gesture) stadium. Is it a football (sketch a football or show a prop (a football, perhaps) or use an image, or teach a gesture for “football”) stadium, or is it a soccer (sketch, gesture, etc.) stadium?”

(Students call out, “Soccer! Football!”)

If there is a lack of consensus on the question, with some students saying football and others saying soccer, then simply point out details on the image, to help students clarify.

“Is it sunny (point to the word “sunny” on the calendar or other visual aid from a previous lesson)?”

(Note: If you have not used the word “sunny” then you can establish its meaning now, or simply choose a word that you have already added to the calendar, for example, “hot.”)

(Students call out, “No!”) “No, it is not sunny. It is dark (place your hand on the night sky in the image). Look (gesture) at the lights (place your hand under the lights in the image).”

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After a couple of minutes spent talking about the first image, continue to the next slide.

“Look (gesture) at this cinema (place your hand on the image).

There are one, two, three (counting) people in the cinema. Is it sunny (point) in the cinema?”

(Students call out, “No!”) “No, it is not sunny in the cinema. It is dark. Is it sunny at the stadium (go back to the first image) or is it dark in the stadium?”

(Students call out, “Dark!”)

“No, it is not sunny in the stadium. It is dark. It is not sunny in the cinema (go back to the image of the cinema). It is dark. Is it crowded (write this word in the course language and perhaps also write a translation, or show pictures that illustrate the meaning of the word “crowded”) in the cinema?”

(Students call out, “Yes! No!”) (Note: Again, if there is debate, this is a good thing, because it leads to more engagement and is an opportunity for you to give more input by pointing out details in the image(s) that help to settle the debate.

Also note that when the emotions get involved, usually students - in all levels - cannot restrain themselves from communicating in their stronger shared language(s). This is OK; you will simply refocus the class and re-state their ideas in the course language, making sure that they are re-focused on listening as you “close off the debate” and move back to the discussion.)

After a couple of minutes spent talking about the first image, continue to the next slides and briefly talk about all four of them in the same manner. Then continue to the “voting” slide.

“OK, we are going to vote. Vote means vote. Show me vote.

Show me look. Show me

think. Show me like. Show me prefer. Show me vote.”

(Note: When cycling through these gestures, you will want to use the form of the verb in each instance that corresponds to the form of the verb used in the original utterance. In this case, for French, it would be the infinitive. So I would say the infinitive of the rest of the verbs, too.

A further note is that I would not worry about the “we are going to” part of this utterance. Students can gather from context that I am saying the class will vote. I do not want to get into establishing the meaning of every single word because it slows down the class activity. If I wanted to work with this construction, I could do a Language Page 182

Study lesson on it, using the recommendations in the Appendices. Here, in the moment, I just want to establish the meaning of the words that are critical for students to comprehend the meaning of the communication. In this case, “vote.”)

“Look at the canoe (place your hand on the canoe). Is this the stadium, the cinema, or the amusement park?”

(Students call out, “Cinema!”)

“Yes this is the cinema. Look (gesture) at the baseball (put your hand on the baseball). Is this the stadium, the lake, or the amusement park?”

(Students call out, “Amusement park!”)

(Continue to review all the images, and then vote.)

“We will vote (gesture). Look (gesture) at the pictures: Look (gesture) at the stadium (point), look (gesture) at the amusement park (point), look (gesture) at the cinema (point), and look (gesture) at the lake (point).

Think (gesture). Think (gesture) about the stadium (point), think (gesture) about the amusement park (point), think (gesture) about the cinema (point), and think (gesture) about the lake (point).

Do you prefer (gesture) the the stadium (point), or do you prefer (gesture) the amusement park (point), or do you prefer (gesture) the cinema (point), or do you prefer (gesture) the lake (point)?

Who in the class (gesture) prefers the cinema (point)?

One, two (counting)…Five people prefer the cinema (note this somewhere).”

(Continue with the rest of the voting. You can ask for further details by asking who likes or loves the places, and tabulate that.)

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Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “Finish My Sentence” strategy, see Session Five.

“OK, we are going to play a game called ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact from what we just learned, in French, and then you will all speak in French as much as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts that we learned, or add on other facts that you know. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point. If you cannot keep talking in French for the whole six seconds, I will get a point.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) The stadium is…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “popular, big, dark, not sunny.” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Six! Good job, a point for the class!”

(Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Question Two. The lake is…”

(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

Repeat, if time permits.

Write and Discuss The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. With a Visual Survey, usually we choose to write about the winner, or sometimes the loser, of the class’s vote. For instance, if 22 people voted for the cinema as their favorite place, you might choose the cinema. Or if no one voted for the amusement park, or only one or two people voted for it, then it is sometimes interesting to write about how no one likes this place, or the specific details of the one or two people who do like it.

Note: Of course, if those one or two students are the less-forthcoming type, or they are in any way marginalized by their peers, or have anxiety about being singled out for any reason, you are advised in the strongest terms to NOT single them out and, rather, focus on the POPULAR option.

You will follow the same procedure as in the previous sessions. If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed. See Session One for an example.

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You will most likely only write three or four sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are building the foundation in these first lessons. You will probably notice that, because most of the lesson components have been repeated several times in the first sessions of the year, you are already seeing less need to explain/give directions in English.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Write: Our favorite place is Say: Is our favorite place the cinema or the amusement park?

Students: cinema!

Say and write: Yes, our favorite place is the cinema…(writing and spelling in French) C-I-N-E-M-A. Write: The cinema is Say: Is the cinema dark or sunny?

Class: Sunny!

Say: Yes, the cinema is dark…(writing and spelling) D-A-R-K. Reading/Recycling: Our favorite place is the cinema. The cinema is dark.

Say: Do 22 people like the cinema or does ONE person like the cinema?

Students: 22!

Say: Yes, 22 people like the café.

Write: Twenty-two people like the cinema.

Reading/Recycling: Our favorite place is the cinema. The cinema is dark. Twenty-two people like the cinema.

Write: The cinema is Say: Class, is the cinema crowded (use the same gesture or place your hand under the visual aid/translation you used previously)?

Class: Yes! Write and spell: crowded. C-R-O-W-D-E-D. Reading/Recycling: Our favorite place is the cinema. The cinema is dark. Twenty-two people like the cinema. The cinema is crowded.

Time permitting, you might write more (or less).

Shared Reading: The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. You will continue to use the three “Go-To” strategies (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits). Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this:

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Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) Our favorite place is the cinema. The cinema is dark.

Twenty-two people like the cinema. The cinema is crowded.

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: our…favorite…place…is…the…cinema…the…cinema…is…dark…Twenty-two…people…like… the…cinema…the…cinema…) (seeing a “teachable moment”, you circle the words “the cinema”) “This is a little boring, to keep saying ‘the cinema, the cinema’ over and over. We can say “it” (change “the cinema” to “it”) to make these sentences sound more interesting. Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: the…cinema…is…dark…Twenty-two…people…like…the…cinema…) (seeing a “teachable moment”, you circle the words “the cinema” again) Wait, this is still too much ‘the cinema.’ I’m going to change this to “it” too. (Note: in French, one of these would be the word “il” and another would be the word “le” but at this moment, I am not going to belabor that at all, or even mention it. The reason is to allow students to notice these differences on their own before jumping in with a bunch of teacher talk that they are more likely to tune out, if they do not first have this sense of curiosity or slight confusion.)

Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: the…cinema…is…dark…Twenty-two…people…it…like…?) (sensing confusion, you circle the word “le”) “This means ‘it.’ Let’s back up to here and go again.” (class reads: the…cinema…is…dark…Twenty-two…people…it…like…it…is…dark…) (continue in this fashion.)

Grammar Discussion “Well done. Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) “We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

“Is the cinema dark or sunny?” (the class responds: dark!)

“Yes, the cinema is dark. Is the lake (pointing to the picture from the Visual Survey) dark?” (the class responds: No!) Page 186

“No, the lake is NOT dark. The lake is…?” (some students finish the sentence: Sunny!)

“Yes, the lake is sunny. Is the cinema crowded?”

Continue in this fashion, time permitting.

The Q and A Game The Q and A Game has students engage in interpersonal speaking, and is a good way for students to practice stretching their spoken discourse to say more and more, in a low-stress and engaging setting — speaking to a partner to answer your questions.

There are several options for playing this “game”. The first one is the “quick and easy way” which is the best way to begin during the first three or four weeks of the year. In this version, students simply count the number of words their partner says.

Students will find a partner, or you will partner them up. Once they are in their partnership, they decide who is A and who is B. If you have an odd number, then you will have one group of three, so you will have to play three rounds, and the other partnerships will have one person speak twice.

You will instruct the Partner As to listen to your question, which you will repeat twice, and then speak their answer to their Partner B. You will instruct the Partner Bs to encourage their partner to “say more and more” by smiling, nodding, and gesturing to them with their hands in a “tell me more” gesture, if they stop speaking.

You can also instruct the Partner Bs to point to resources on the walls, such as the class’s Shared Writing text displayed on the projector screen, that will help the Partner A to say more. It is recommended that you leave your projector on during this time specifically so that you can display the class’s shared writing to support students’ speech.

The Partner Bs will count on their fingers the number of words that their Partner A says. Each word is a point for the partnership, and the goal is to have as many points as possible.

You then ask the Partner As to listen to you repeat a question two times. Then all the Partner As talk to their Partner B and say as much in French as they can to respond to the question, add on, and perhaps ask Partner B an additional, related question.

The purpose of having students try to say as much as possible is to stretch them to produce their own original utterances and not just repeat the language used in the question. The performance indicator that separates Novice High speaking from Intermediate Low is that speakers (and writers, too) are able to produce novel sentences, and so you are setting up a task (saying as much as you can) that requires students to try their hand at saying more, original statements after using the language you provided in the question.

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For example, if you ask the question, “Is the cinema dark or sunny?” then you will hear most of the Partner As beginning by saying, “The cinema is dark,” almost as a choral response, as they begin speaking to their Partner B. Then, you will generally hear a cacophony of less-confident, more hesitant speech as the Partner Bs gesture encouragingly to the Partner As and the Partner As add on more information. Of course, beginning students will be producing some very hesitant speech once they strike out on their own to add on their own ideas.

Also, their statements will most likely be riddled with less-than-perfect language, and they will most likely be casting their eyes around the room to find language supports to help them keep talking. Some might even be reading the Shared Writing text to their partner.

This is completely normal and OK; your students are growing, and you have again set up a task that rewards their continued interaction with the language input, by leaving the Shared Writing text there for them to refer back to.

After you ask the Partner As a question, you will then ask the Partner Bs a different question, and the students will switch roles.

Today’s Student Application and Assessment might sound something like this: “You will get with a partner and speak to that person in French to answer a question that I will ask you.”

(Students get with a partner in whatever way you have chosen.)

“You will decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “You will decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (once half the class is raising their hand) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.”

“Partner A, Is the cinema popular or is the lake popular? Is the cinema popular, or is the lake popular?”

(Partner As are talking, Partner Bs are counting. After about 20 seconds, it is usually time to move on.)

“Partner B, Is the cinema sunny or is the cinema dark? Is the cinema sunny, or is the cinema dark?”

(Continue on in this manner if time permits.)

After this, it is fun to ask the students to raise their hands if their partner earned more than ten points, more than 15 points, more than 20 points, until you have a “winner” whose partner said the most words. You can award a sticker or some small prize, or simply applaud their achievement. Then, you can continue on to another “round” and ask all the Partner As a new question. You can ask the students to stay with their partner or find a new partner for the new round.

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Students’ speaking performance during these end-of-class application tasks is highly-contextualized within a familiar, “practiced” context, because they have just received instruction on the day’s topic and there is so much scaffolding available to them in the form of resources displayed in the room. So, it is entirely within the grasp of students even in their very first weeks of language study to be able to perform in class at the Intermediate Low level, when speaking about a “practiced” topic from that day’s lesson and with access to resources (like the Shared Writing text) that have lots of language for them to use.

For students to develop true Intermediate Low proficiency, however, meaning that they can speak at that level in multiple contexts, including those that provide no scaffolding, about various topics, including topics of general community and world interest that they have not “practiced”, you will have to wait patiently and provide months of language interactions that allow the natural process of language acquisition to unfold.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 7

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

(NOTE: The example objectives and lesson are given in French; they can be used with any language. You can download materials in multiple languages from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or use the examples to make your own materials.

Beginner: write words or phrases in French to describe the class's preferences about (topic) Intermediate: write two or more sentences in French write words or phrases in French to describe the class's preferences about (topic), using transition words to say more Advanced: write a paragraph in French to describe the class's preferences about (topic), using transition words to say more and organize your paragraph Preparation For the next lesson, in Session 8, which is another Card/Slide Talk, this time about preferences, you will probably want to tell the class to think about their favorite/least favorite example of the topic you want to address in the Card/Slide Talk about Preferences lesson, if you are planning to do Card Talk. If you are planning to do Slide Talk, you will most likely assign them the task of uploading their images to the class’s slideshow as homework, or set aside some time in class, either at the end of this lesson or the beginning of the Slide Talk lesson, for them to upload their images. The example lesson in Session 8 is “weird chores,” so if you plan to use that topic, you might want to check out Session 8 before assigning this task to students.

To prepare the Class Survey, you can choose to use picture prompts, such as the ones in the example lesson, which you can download from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or you can simply make a chart on the board or overhead projector (using pen and paper or a digital format like Google Docs) in which you can record students’ responses to your questions about their preferences. You can choose any topic about which to survey your class. The example from our TpT store is about the topic of shopping and restaurants.

If you are going to make your own survey, you will first want to choose the topic. You might have topics that you need to cover, or that you and your students find interesting. Some possibilities are: foods (pizza, cookies, fruits, etc.), types of cuisine (Italian, Chinese, Thai, etc.), types of locations (the beach, the city, the mountain, etc.), sports/activities (theatre, baseball, soccer, etc.), or clothing (dresses, suits and ties, boots, etc.). Of course, there are an almost-unlimited number of possible topics. Basically, you want a category (e.g. sports/activities) and then specific examples within that category (e.g. soccer, debate, theatre, basketball). Generally, about eight specific examples is a good number to work with.

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Soliciting Students’ Ideas for the Specific Examples in the List You can either pre-select the specific examples, or, if you want to solicit more student input and tailor the lesson to your students’ specific interests within the larger category, you can simply decide on the topic (e.g. sports/activities) and then generate a list of eight or so specific examples with your students during class. You would tell them - most likely in the class’s stronger shared language at the beginning of the Guided Oral Input time - that you are going to lead a class survey - a poll - of their favorite and least favorite sports and activities (or foods, or clothing, etc.), and then work with them to make a list, and then vote on the specific examples one by one, working your way down the list (or part of the list, if you run out of time in the Guided Oral Input portion of the lesson).

Because this is not demonstrated in the example lesson, here is a short demonstration of how that process might go.

“Class, we are going to do a survey, a poll, and you will vote on your favorite and least favorite sports and activities. First we need to make a list of options. So, turn and tell a partner what sports and activities you like and don’t like.” (students talk, probably in their stronger shared language, for about 30 seconds.)

“Now, we will start the discussion in French. I will ask you for some sports and activities to put on the list.

You can give them to me in English if you can’t say them in French. I will speak in French and write them on the list for you in French.”

(Have your Class Starter, if you have one, give the signal to start French time, or give the signal yourself, and have your Videographer begin recording, if you have set that up. You might want to begin with a brief calendar check-in before transitioning to the class survey, as demonstrated below.)

“OK, think (gesture) about sports (place your hand under the word “sports” on the grid you have drawn, and sketch a little drawing that represents sports, perhaps a baseball).

Think (gesture) about activities (place your hand under the word “activities” on the grid you have drawn, and sketch a little drawing that represents activities, perhaps a music note).

(model a couple of examples to begin the list)

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Football (write “football” in the course language and sketch to reinforce the meaning) is a sport (place your hand under “sports”).

Basketball (write “basketball” in the course language and sketch to reinforce the meaning) is a sport (place your hand under “sports”).

Other (gesture) sports (place your hand under the word “sports”)? Other (gesture) activities (place your hand under the word “activities”)? (students call out various sports and activities, most likely in English)

Yes, debate (write “debate” in the course language and sketch to reinforce the meaning) is an activity (place your hand under “activities”).

(Continue until you have a list of six to ten (more or less) sports/activities.)

Think (gesture) about football (place your hand under the word/sketch).

Who in the class (gesture with one hand raised and the other indicating the class) LOVES (write “loves” in the course language and draw a sketch, perhaps a heart) football (place your hand under the word/sketch “football”)?

(You can either write students’ names or make tally marks to record the class’s responses. Both options are illustrated below.)

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“Think (gesture) about football (place your hand under the word/sketch). Who in the class (gesture with one hand raised and the other indicating the class) LIKES (write “likes” in the course language and draw a sketch, perhaps a thumbs-up) football (place your hand under the word/sketch “football”)?”

(Tabulate students’ responses, using names or tally marks. Continue in this fashion, adding other responses (e.g. “does not like” and “hates/loathes/detests with the fire of a thousand suns”) and tabulating them. Then proceed to survey the class about the next example in the list (in this example, basketball) and tabulate students’ responses.)

Preparing a Class Survey using Pictures You can also prepare a slideshow, Jamboard, Padlet, or other interactive digital format and use pictures of the specific examples (e.g. football, debate, theatre, soccer) to conduct the survey. You can choose to share the digital file with students so that they can enter their own responses, or you can simply use the slideshow to tabulate students’ responses through shows of hands, after which you can type into the file to record their answers.

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The most basic way to do this is to have one slide per example, and perhaps a “key” at the top of each image, to help you tabulate the responses, as shown in this example. I made the slide background in Canva, which has a large collection of graphics. You can get a free “educator” account that gives you access to the “pro” library of images (photos and graphics) from Canva, and I highly recommend it, because as a language teacher, the graphics really come in handy for supporting comprehension. It works best to set the image as the the slide background and then add text boxes to type students’ responses on the slide.

If you want to set up your Class Survey to be more like a Visual Survey, you would just make slides with pictures or graphics to represent each example (e.g. a slide for theatre, a slide for soccer, etc.) and then have the “voting” slide at the end, with all the examples together, so students can vote all at once, after you have discussed their preferences on the individual slides.

You can also download our Class Surveys that are aligned to Cycle One Phase Two, in multiple languages, from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff). Now, we will move on to the lesson procedures for the example lesson, using a digital Class Survey on various places to go in town (restaurants, shopping, etc.).

German Beginne

Continue to greet the students in English, review

r Reading Worksh

op Text: Brochu re

where to put their things, etc., remind them briefly that they need to work together to focus and listen.

Remind them that each day the first activity of class will be reading. You might want to tell them that the lesson today represents a slight “pivot” away from describing settings, moving into describing people, or more specifically, their preferences - what they like, what they don’t like, what they hate, etc. You might tell them that to begin the lesson, you will read about foods and mealtimes.

If you are using our materials, you might also want to tell them that we are also pivoting in the format of the Reading Workshop texts we will use in this phase, and that we will read brochures. If your students are unfamiliar with what a “brochure” is (in today’s non-paper world), you might bring in some examples to show them. You could even spend the entire Reading Workshop today passing around some brochures written in Page 194

the course language, and simply allow students to look them over, perhaps working with a partner, to see what information they can derive from them, as a less teacher-centered Reading Workshop lesson to kick off this phase.

Another note on our materials is that beginning in Cycle One, Phase Two, each lesson includes four levels of texts: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Plus. The Plus reading is designed for upper-level students, or any students needing additional challenge, such as Heritage learners and native speakers of the language.

German Intermediate Text

German Advanced Text

German “Plus" Text

A Note on the Videographer If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now. The benefits are so valuable. If you have already been using the Videographer, and you have a little collection of class videos, I encourage you to start watching a few each week, without much of an agenda, just to see what you can see as you observe yourself.

It’s truly surprising how powerful this practice can be, even if all you ever do is watch your videos in this nonchalant, unfocused way. You will make enormous strides if you can get over the initial awkwardness (or, let’s be honest, the initial paralyzing, incapacitating, abject fear) of watching yourself on video. It is worth it.

And the abject fear will soon shrink into just slight awkwardness, and then (in my experience, at least) into a real appreciation for yourself, and a deep feeling of ownership of your strengths, and a sense of

That’s right. ME GUSTA watching myself on video…NOW. I was a pile of nerves at first. But it was THE MOST VALUABLE professional developm ent I ever undertook.

And I want that for YOU!

empowerment to tackle your “flaws” or “growth areas.”

Your growth areas probably won’t find, examine, and correct themselves. If that were the case, they probably would not still be areas of growth for you. So, you really have two options. Hope that they go away magically on your own, if you ignore them long enough…or take the first real step in correcting them: SEEING them, acknowledging them, and being honest with yourself about your own teaching practice, skills, and persona.

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If you have not done so already, I urge you, encourage you, I beg you, I beseech you from the bottom of my heart, to consult the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on this job.

Find That Cognate Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer, I beseech you, Reader), and begin the lesson.

See the notes in Session One for detailed instructions on how you might conduct this Reading Workshop strategy. Note that I am re-using the simplest Reading Workshop strategy possible, Find that Cognate, because this text is, while still quite simple, a more challenging passage than the cognate readings that were used in Cycle One Phase One. So, in order to reduce students’ cognitive load, when transitioning to this more challenging format, I have chosen to re-use this very simple strategy so that the format of the task is as simple as I can possibly make it, as the content of the text is more complex and challenging.

Distribute or display the text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

“Let’s read this text about “What the French prefer in tourists who visit France”. Your job is to notice (if the students have a paper copy, you might say “mark the text”) the cognates, the words that are the same in English and French. I will read to you in French, then you will tell me the cognates you noticed (you can say them in English).”

“I will read in French and remember that your only job is to listen and understand, and my job is to make it easy to understand. Shawn, let’s go!”

(Shawn gives the signal. You take a deep, calming breath and center yourself to lead the class through a simple, very comprehensible task.)

(Place your hand or pointer on the title of the text and begin reading in a slow yet fluid way, moving your hand or pointer through the text as you go. Resist the temptation to stop and establish meaning. The goal is for students to actually read through the text in its entirety with you, looking for cognates.)

(Read the text aloud in the language.)

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(Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘fascination’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, fascination in English, is fascination. F-A-S-C-I-N-A-T-I-O-N. Fascination.”

(Note: This sounds like: “Oui, fascination est fascination. effff - ahhhh - essss - sayyy - etc. (saying letters in French). Fascination.”)

(Repeat with another cognate, or solicit students’ noticings, perhaps similarly to what is modeled below.)

“Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates (might need to write this in the course language and the class’s stronger shared language to establish meaning)?”

“Can you read any other words?”

(Getting back into the language, and repeating the same words that you just used in that little English aside,) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, normal in English, is normal. (spelling in French) N-O-R-M-A-L.” Take a few more cognates or (if no one volunteers) continue asking questions like the first one modeled above. After a few minutes, you will want to move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then the Class Survey.

Class Survey (Preferences) It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…September 3 (jot “3” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or August 3?”

(Some kids call out “September”) “Yes, class, today is September…3 (write 3 on the calendar).”

“Class, is today Wednesday (point)…or Friday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Wednesday!” ) “Yes, class, today is Wednesday (point), September (point) 3 (point).”

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“Is the year (write the word year in French on the calendar, and perhaps spell it out as you do so) 2021 (jot “2021”) or 2022 (jot “2022”)?”

(Some kids call out “2021!” ) “Yes, class, today is Wednesday (point), September (point) 3 (point), 2021 (write “2021” by the word “year” on the calendar).”

(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)…is it windy (point/hold up a visual aid that says “windy” in a “windy way” in your course language, like the examples provided, or establish a gesture) or rainy (use visual or gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Windy!/Rainy!/No!) Today it is NOT rainy, and it is NOT windy. (depending on answers, you might write or place a visual aid on the calendar).

Class, is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot (depending on answers, you might write or place a visual aid on the calendar).

Then, you will move on to the Class Survey. At the beginning of this session, you will find an explanation and lesson demonstration of how you might proceed if you want to draw a graph to collect students’ responses.

This example lesson uses the Class Survey from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), on shopping and places in town. As explained above, you can use any topic as long as it is a category and at least four or five specific examples (e.g. in the category of “school subjects,” the specific examples might be chemistry, biology, algebra, Spanish, and performing arts). This is a good chance to “angle” the input to work with any required vocabulary to which you might need or want to expose students.

If you have required vocabulary or grammar, please take careful note of the information below. It is presented here in the hope of saving you a lot of stress.

Important Notice Please do not rely on your communicative language teaching to achieve the objective of students’ memorizing lists of required vocabulary, or, for that matter, being able to manipulate grammar features in the language. These are conscious learning objectives.

Communication in the language - giving students ample opportunities to process comprehensible language they hear or read, is the only path to building students’ acquired competence in the language, BUT it cannot do everything. For that reason, you are encouraged to use other strategies that activate students’ conscious minds if your objective is for them to memorize vocabulary so that everyone knows the same words. Or, at least everyone might remember them until the inevitable “brain dump” after the quiz or test; consciously-studied vocabulary is notoriously fragile unless reinforced by - wait for it - COMMUNICATION that USES the words in CONTEXT. Using the Page 198

language in a meaningful, engaging context is the topic of this book and the focus of our national standards, and most states’ standards.

In order to introduce or reinforce (NOT to “hammer into their heads” or “get them to memorize”) thematic vocabulary, you can often “angle” the topics of your lessons to EXPOSE students to the vocabulary in context. However, unless you ALSO engage them in some conscious learning (vocabulary games, flashcards, the Word-Off, anchor charts, etc.), you will not see consistent results for all students through this “exposure” approach.

It helps. It really does. If we can use the required words over the course of several lessons, ideally spread out over several weeks, months, or even years, we give our students a schema or “container” that they can “file” the vocabulary into, when engaged in conscious learning strategies.

If you can get comfortable with separating the language acquisition part of your course from the conscious learning part of your course, then you will find more peace and a surer feeling about this whole communicative language teaching thing. Please see the Appendices for more guidance on ways to plan lessons for conscious learning.

This lesson example uses a slideshow from our Teachers Pay Teachers materials, a Class Survey on places students like to go (e.g. restaurants, cinema, etc.). There are other options available on TpT as well, including the following slideshow on “Types of Teachers.” You might spend more than one lesson on this session, and if so, you might choose to return to the survey you conduct today, or conduct a different survey. Here are some slides from the “Types of Teachers” survey, to give you some ideas of other ways to conduct this lesson.

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I love this survey; it is so fun! Please feel free to “steal” or use and adapt this or any idea in this book. If you want to purchase it ready-made, I will happily save you the work of re-creating it. But if you are the “hyperaustucieuse” type as shown above (super-crafty), please never, ever hesitate to remake ANY of the ideas presented in this book. That’s what you paid for; the ideas and inspiration and guidance! Go forth and teach and use these ideas however you want. I promise I will never pursue any hard-working teacher who is simply trying to educate kids on the limited budgets that decades of misguided public policy that has eroded the financial resources available to our profession have left us with. So, please, rest easy, and teach freely!

The example slideshow has four slides to determine what the class’s favorite place is, and then, for the most popular option, I will use one of the slides that give more details about the locations, to determine what their favorite thing is in that location.

Let’s move on to the lesson procedures.

First, create a table on the board, chart paper, in a digital format (like Google Docs, etc.), or on paper under your document camera, in which you will record students’ preferences as you work through the survey with them. An example of what the survey might look like is provided here. You can choose any expressions that describe preferences that you want to reinforce, or simply use the ones provided.

“OK, class, look (gesture) at this survey (put your hand under the word “survey” on the projected slideshow and write the translation).

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(Proceeding on to the first slide) “Look (gesture) at the fast food restaurant (put your hand on the word or image of fast food) and think (gesture) about fast food (point).

Who in our class (gesture) loves (gesture) fast food (point)?”

(Students raise hands or call out, and you tabulate the results on the class chart, either writing their names or using tally marks.)

(If you write names, you might spell them out in the course language for additional exposure to the names of the letters in the language. If you use tally marks, you could count them aloud as you write the marks, for additional exposure to the names of the numbers in the language.)

(Continue through the other options you have chosen for preferences, such as “likes” and “does not like” until you have established the class’s preferences for all the options in the survey.

exam ple of a comp leted cla

ss su rvey

Establish the “winner” that the majority of the class likes best. You might not have time to go on to the next part today, and so you might move on to Scaffolded Oral Review at this point; you could return to the additional options for that choice in the next lesson and explore further details about what is the most popular option. For example, if the class favorite is clothes shopping, you might continue on to ask if they prefer shoe shopping, or shopping for athletic clothing, or shopping for fancy dress clothing.)

(Moving on to a slide that you have prepared that shows options for that choice. In the example, you see a slide in French that gives options for “films” — comedies, horror, Westerns, fantasy films, and animated films.)

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“Who in the class (gesture) loves fantasy films?”

(Tabulate students’ responses. You might ask for examples of that option, such as titles or name brands, as shown in the example.)

“Think (gesture) about Harry Potter. Is Harry Potter a fantasy film (place your hand under the words to reinforce the meaning)?”

“Other (gesture) fantasy films?”

(Students may call out examples. Record students’ responses, perhaps spelling in the language as you write them, and then continue through the rest of the options in the same fashion.)

After you have spent about 10 to 12 minutes in the Guided Oral Input portion of the lesson, you may find that you have not made it through all the options. That is fine; you can simply move on to the Scaffolded Oral Review and the rest of the daily instructional framework with the information that you do have.

You might return to the rest of the options in the next lesson. Block classes are not scheduled to have another lesson using the Class Survey, so you will want to come to a stopping place in the second session of Guided Oral Input in this lesson.

Here are some examples from the French slideshow that show some possible options to extend the discussion of these topics, using the category of “clothing stores.”

These are a possible additional options for the topic of “restaurants.” You might have time today, or in the next lesson, to discuss one or more of the additional options. You will most likely want to prepare a set of extension options for each of the topics in the survey (in this example, “clothing stores,” “films,” “restaurants,” Page 202

and “fast food”) because you will not know ahead of time which one of the options will be the most popular in your class, so you will not know which set of additional options you will want to use.

If the discussion of a certain topic is super-compelling for your students, I urge you to challenge yourself to allow the discussion to linger on that topic, without feeling pressure to “cover” the other options. For example, you may end up spending the entire Guided Oral Input time (which is not that long, really, being only about 12 to 15 minutes in a short period and 20 to 30 minutes in a block period - broken up into two shorter sessions of Guided Oral Input) talking about the very first option of “fast food” because your students were so engaged in simply expressing their preferences about fast food. So this might mean that you never got to the other topics (in this example, the other topics woukd be “clothing stores,” “films,” and “restaurants”).

This is a natural aspect of a student-centered, communicative language course. Because we are basically engineering ways to conduct communication in the course language, the specific content of a given lesson is “up in the air” until we are actually in communication with our students during the lesson.

This is a very important point, and one of my main objectives for you in writing this book in such long-winded detail. So please mark this passage if you see yourself and your concerns reflected in the following paragraphs, and you feel that you could stand to re-read it.

A Very Important Point Many language teachers transitioning to communicative language teaching find this aspect of the approach not knowing in advance if they will cover the topic of “fast food” in detail, or if they will even get to the topics of “clothing stores,” “films,” and “restaurants” - can cause a measure of anxiety. For some of us, it is a great deal of anxiety. Many teachers like to plan out their lessons, of course, because we are teachers, after all, and generally as a group we are rather organized and like to know what the future holds. (Of course, there are also many teachers who thrive on the seat-of-your-pants, “cliffhanger” approach to planning lessons, so if that’s you, I see you, too!). For teachers of all personality types, however, not being able to predict what direction the conversation will take on a given day, and what specific content or words you will “cover” can be a source of some real stress.

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Stepping Stones is designed to greatly reduce this stress and make communicative language teaching feel “safe” and doable, even for those of us who like to have everything planned out. It is designed to provide you a map, a pathway, a set of guardrails, and a schedule that you can plan out, in as much detail as you want or need, while leaving the specific topics and direction of the conversation open enough to allow you to respond to the in-the-moment engagement your students have for the individual topic.

If you can relax into the idea that you might not cover these topics at all in Cycle One Phase Two this time around, this year, in this class, you will be well on your way to one of the main benefits of the Stepping Stones curricular framework.

In another section of the same course, you might find that those students are not particularly engaged in the topic of fast food. Perhaps in Spanish One in second period, everyone had lots to contribute on the topic of “fast food” and so you really not have time to discuss any of the other topics (in this example, “clothing stores,” “films,” and “restaurants”) with that group. Then, to your surprise, in your other section of Spanish One, in seventh period, you might discuss all of the topics (in this example, “fast food,” “clothing stores,” “films,” and “restaurants”) with them. So, now what should you do, tomorrow? Does second period need to “catch up” to seventh period?

For many teachers, this is a real conundrum. Their two Spanish One classes have pretty much received two entirely different lessons! Here’s the big, important point:

This is how Stepping Stones is designed. It is designed for you to have the flexibility to respond to student interests, without one class “getting behind” another.

If you do not ever make it through all the options, that is fine. The goal of Guided Oral Input is to provide a mechanism for the class to participate in a communicative task in the course language. Here’s another big, important point.

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Because this Class Survey is designed to elicit a discussion of preferences, you can rest assured that, even if you only “cover” one or two of the options, you will use the language function of describing preferences throughout the discussion, so you are “doing it right.”

Stepping Stones, as explained in Chapter Five, is designed to provide you with the maximum structure and also the maximum flexibility, with the least amount of prep and stress, once you have a solid foundation in the curricular framework and the daily instructional framework, and you are confident with a limited number of strategies to deliver the instruction within those frameworks. So, one of the main ways for you to relieve your stress when learning Stepping Stones this year is to allow yourself to not cover everything in a given lesson.

If you can keep in mind the fact that your goal is to conduct a communicative activity using the language function (in this case, describing preferences) and NOT to teach the specifics of the class survey (e.g. fast food, clothing), then it is my most sincere hope that you will begin to get more settled in your teaching, and drop into an easy flow, without the pressure to “cover” certain specifics or the uneasy feeling that one class covered Topics A, B, C, and D, while another only covered Topic B, because they were so engaged in that conversation.

You will probably see two huge benefits from this: (1) you will feel less stress and pressure and (2) you will be more relaxed in your lesson delivery, and you will allow yourself to linger on topics that are particularly interesting to your particular class, which will naturally and quite effortlessly tailor your instruction to your students’ interests and strengths, without the pressure to curtail an interesting discussion because you have to get to the option of “clothing stores” when the discussion of “restaurants” turned out to be so engaging to this particular group on this particular day.

Because there is no way for a curriculum writer (such as myself) to know what your specific students will find engaging and interesting on any given day, I have not developed a curriculum with specific material that you need to “cover.” Rather, I have developed a set of frameworks and strategies that move the instructional focus away from specific content and words, as much as possible, and that instead focuses on the kinds of language functions that are outlined in the ACTFL standards, performance guidelines, and Can-Do statements (e.g. describing people, narrating personal stories, expressing an opinion, etc.).

This kind of learning objective is general enough to allow you a great deal of latitude in the specific content that you choose to address, and in the instructional and assessment strategies that you choose to deliver the content and provide opportunities for students to demonstrate and evaluate their learning.

It is my very, very sincere hope that, as you work through this book, you will begin to trust that Stepping Stones “has your back,” that you will be able to reconceptualize the big learning objectives for your course(s) in terms of the language and literacy goals embedded in the curricular framework, so that you can feel

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confident that language teaching in a communicative manner is doable, natural, and, as time goes on, more and more comfortable and effortless for you.

Now, we will continue on to the Scaffolded Oral Review portion of the lesson, which you will move on to after about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many topics you covered. Take a deep breath and move on; it’s going to be OK!

True-False Quiz Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “True-False Quiz” strategy, see Session Three.

“OK, time for a review quiz. It is true (gesture thumbs up) and false (gesture thumbs down).”

Write the words for “true” and “false” in your language on the board, or have signs or other visual aids ready to use, or simply ask students, “Show me true, show me false” to help them learn and recognize the thumbsup and thumbs-down gesture you are using.

“Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. LOTS (gesture) of people….shhhh….

LOVE (gesture) going to clothing stores….shhhhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…LOTS (gesture) of people LOVE (gesture) … shhhh….going to clothing stores.”

(The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes, FALSE! (gesture or use visual aid). Only two people love going to clothing stores.

Question two. True (gesture) or false (gesture)? LOTS (gesture) of people….shhhh…. HATE (gesture) watching films…. shhhhh….True (gesture/ visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…LOTS (gesture) of people HATE (gesture) …shhhh….watching films.”

(The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes, FALSE! (gesture or use visual aid). Fourteen people LOVE (gesture) watching films. Only three people HATE (gesture) watching films.”

Repeat with more true-false questions if time permits.

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Write and Discuss The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. You will follow the same procedure as in the previous sessions. If time permits, you might do a little Write and Discuss move called Writing More Than Originally Existed. See Session One for an example.

You will still most likely find that you only have time to write three or four sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are still building the foundation in these first lessons, and even throughout the year(s) you might routinely only write a few sentences in any given Shared Writing session, so that you have time for the other lesson components in the daily instructional framework.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Write: What our class Say: What our class LOVES or what our class HATES? Students: LOVES! Say and write: What our class loves L-O-V-E-S. Write: Our class LOVES Say: Does our class love going to clothing stores, or watching films?

Class: Films! Watching films! etc.

Say: Yes, our class loves watching films…(writing and spelling) F-I-L-MS. Reading/Recycling: What our class loves. Our class loves watching films.

Say: Do ALL (gesture) the people (or the WHOLE (gesture) class) love watching films?

Students: No! Say: Do 26 people love watching films or do 3 people (hold up three fingers) like watching films?

Students: 26!

Say and write: 26 people LOVE watching films, (say “comma” in the course language) but Say: How many (gesture) people DON’T LIKE (gesture or point to the words) watching films? One (hold up one finger)? Two (two fingers)? Three (hold up three fingers)? How many (gesture) people DON’T LIKE (gesture or point to the words) watching films? One (one finger) person? Two (two fingers) people?

Students: ONE! Say and write: 26 people LOVE watching films, but one person Say: Does Mateo HATE (gesture or point to the word) or NOT LIKE (gesture or point) watching films?

Students: Not like!

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Say and write: 26 people LOVE watching films, (say “comma” in the course language)but one person, (say “comma” in the course language) M-A-T-E-O… (verifying spelling of the name) Mateo, yes? Correct? M-A-TE-O does not like watching films.

Reading/Recycling: What Our Class Loves: 26 people LOVE watching films, but one person, Mateo, does not like watching films.

Time permitting, you might write more or less.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies During Shared Reading, you will work with the text that your class just created together. You will continue to use the three “Go-To” strategies (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits). Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) What Our Class Loves: 26 people LOVE watching films, but one person, Mateo, does not like watching films. 17 people in the class LOVE horror films, but 12 people in the class HATE them.

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Your job is to read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s how language works; you can’t always translate every single word. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: it???? what???…) (sensing confusion, you circle the words “ce que (‘that which’, or ‘what’ in English) “This word means “that” and this word means “what” or “which.” In English we say “what I love” but in French we say “that which I love.” (Write “that” over “ce” and “which” over “que”.). So, when there are two words in French but only one word in English, we will just say what it literally mesns in English, as closely as we can, because we are translating every word, word by word. Let’s start over here.” (class reads: that…which…????) (sensing confusion, you circle the word “notre”) “This word means “our.” Let’s start over here.” (class reads: that…which…our…class…loves…26…people…love…watching…???…the?)

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(Please note that *technically* this would most likely say “voir” in French (the infinitive “to see”) and so “watching” is not an exact match. But there has already been so much interruption and popup grammar, and it is not giving the students any problems comprehending, and I would most likely get super-lost in some grammar explanation of what an “infinitive” is, and most of my students would probably get really confused, because they generally don’t even have a concept in their stronger language(s) of what an “infinitive” is…

So, in a situation like this, I think to myself, “Whatever.” That’s a technical professional educator’s term for “We can return to this later, for the students’ cognitive load is heavy at this time.”

Just to return to the flow of class, you just heard the class read: (class reads: that…which…our…class…loves…26…people…love…watching…???…the?) (sensing confusion, you say) “This word means “the” and in French we just have to say “the” here, when in English we don’t say anything, just usually “We like FILMS.” In French, there are a lot more times we say “the” than we do in English. Let’s start over here.” (class reads: that…which…our…class…loves…26…people…love…watching…the…films…but…) (continue in this fashion.) (sensing confusion, you say), “Wow, you figured out what the word mais means! How cool is that? I never told you the meaning of mais, but your brains are so good at French that you just figured it out from the context! Great job! Let’s start over here.”

(Note: please think about how valuable it is for students to “back up” in the text and re-read the grammar point that you just taught them about, and how it is basically forcing them to interact with the language input again and again, to help reinforce the conscious learning they just undertook in thinking about the grammar point you were making.) (class reads: 26…people…love…watching…the…films…but…one…person…Mateo…) (sensing confusion, you say), “This means ‘not’ (circling “ne”) and remember in French we have to say “not” twice, so remember that this part (circle “pas”) means “not,” too. Let’s go back and start here.” (class reads: 26…people…love…watching…the…films…but…one…person…Mateo…not…like…not… watching…the…films…)

(Continue in this fashion, time permitting.)

Grammar Discussion “Nice work, us. Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

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To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) “We are going to discuss what we wrote. If you need to look back at the text, you can. It is right there. But if you can look back here and answer the questions, you will feel really smart and know that you are learning a lot of French.”

Your specific questions will vary depending on the content of the class discussion. As the book goes on, and you develop your skills, the example questions and content will be, gradually, reduced, as you strike out on your own. It’s kind of like learning to ride a bike. I have been pushing the bike along with you, and you have training wheels on, but gradually I will step aside little by little, and then we will raise your training wheels, centimeter by centimeter, and before you know it, you will look back and see me cheering you on, from way back in the carport, and you will wonder, “How did I get so good at riding this thing?” And then, my sincere hope for you is that you will grow so confident that you will be popping wheelies and doing all kinds of tricks that I cannot imagine now.

This book is written for you to outgrow it. This is the first little step. Simply keep your Shared Writing text projected, and look at it, and ask a few either-or, yes-no, true-false questions. Lob your students some easyto-hit softballs, and you will be amazed at how far you go, and how soon you get there. And if you ever want to refresh your memory on how this looks, you can always return to the sessions that provided more handholding, read over them, and use the examples I provide when the strategy is new, to get your mind wrapped around how it might look for the specific lesson you are implementing a familiar strategy in today.

Written Quick Quiz Note: For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please see Session 5 in which it was first introduced.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Please note that, even for a written quiz, it is highly recommended that you still use gestures, facial expressions, or even walk to the board or Shared Writing text, to point out visuals that might make the questions more comprehensible.

“OK, quiz time. You will listen to the question TWO TIMES. You will NOT answer aloud; write a word, a phrase, or a sentence in French to give the correct answer. Spelling does NOT count; you will get an A if you can show the correct answer, in French, with any kind of spelling that you think is best, as long as it shows that you know the answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, how many (gesture) people in the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) football…. shhhhh…. one person (hold up one finger) or 17 people? how many (gesture) people in the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) football…. shhhhh…. one person (hold up one finger) or 17 people…shhhh?”

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“Number Two. (two fingers) how many (gesture) people in the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) football…. shhh…. one person (hold up one finger) or 17 people? how many (gesture) people in the class (gesture to the class) LOVE (gesture) football…. shhh…. one person (one finger) or 17 people…shh?”

Continue in this manner, perhaps asking three to five total questions, making sure to leave about five minutes at the end of class to grade them. For more details on suggested ways to use the in-class grading as a learning opportunity (as students listen to you restate the questions and check their answers, or a partner’s answers), please see Session Five.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals or perhaps telling them that tomorrow they will be able to understand and say even more.

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Instructional Session 8

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to answer questions to describe the preferences of people in class preferences about weird chores they have to do Intermediate: say two or more sentences in French to describe the preferences of people in class preferences about weird chores they have to do, using transition words to say more Advanced: say a paragraph in French to describe the preferences of people in class about weird chores they have to do, using transition words to say more and organize your paragraph Preparation To prepare for Session Nine, the Community Survey, you might assign the task of surveying one, two, or three (or any other number) of people from the community on the topic of the survey. The example lesson uses the topic of school subjects, and students bring a response from one or two teachers and two or more students.

You can use any topic you want, and have students interview people in general, without specifying the categories of people to interview (e.g. teachers or students). However, having students bring responses from a specific category of people, or from two categories, as in the example of teachers and students, usually leads to a more interesting class discussion.

To prepare for this lesson, on Slide Talk or Card Talk, please see Session 5, in which this strategy was first introduced, if you need to re-read the detailed explanation of how to prepare for Card Talk or Slide Talk. This lesson uses the example of a Slide Talk from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) on the topic of “weird chores.”

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Here are some example slides from the Latin slideshow, which also happens to contain some cultural information: the labors of Hercules. I am sure that for many of our students, the weird chores they have to do, indeed, do feel like Herculean tasks, at times!

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Pronunciation Practice See the notes in Session Three for detailed instructions on how you might conduct this Reading Workshop strategy. In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Two, shown below, in French. Other levels from our TpT store are shown Italian Beginner

in Italian.

Italian Intermediate

Italian Advanced

French Beginner Text - Brochure

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use black text. The class’s stronger shared language is written in this color.

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Italian “Plus”

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language. “I will read this brochure to you in French, about seasons to visit French Polynesia.” (read in the course language) “Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so that students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ even more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then the Card/Slide Talk.

Card/Slide Talk (Preferences: Weird Chores) It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

“Look (gesture and pause to sweep the class with your eyes to check for understanding) at the calendar. Is today’s date…September 9 (jot “9” somewhere, perhaps on the board) or October 9?”

(Some kids call out “September”) “Yes, class, today is September…9 (write 3 on the calendar).”

“Class, is today Thursday (point)…or Monday (point)?

(Some kids call out “Monday!” ) Page 214

“Yes, class, today is Monday (point), September (point) 9 (point).”

“Is the year 2021 (place your hand under “2021” on the calendar) or 2022 (jot “2022”)?”

(Some kids call out “2021!” ) “Yes, class, today is Monday (point), September (point) 9 (point), 2021 (point).”

(Walk over to the window, or display the weather forecast, if you have no windows.)

Look (gesture) out the window (walk to the window and point).

Look (gesture) out the window…think (gesture)…is it sunny (point/hold up a visual aid that says “sunny” in a “windy way” in your course language, like the examples provided, or establish a gesture) or rainy (use visual or gesture)?

(Students answer, in English or French, depending on ability/inclination, Windy!/Rainy!/No!) Today it is NOT rainy, and it is NOT windy. (depending on answers, you might write or place a visual aid on the calendar).

Class, is it hot (gesture) or cold (gesture)?

(Students answer) Today it is hot. Very hot (depending on answers, you might write or place a visual aid on the calendar).

Then, you will move on to Card or Slide Talk. For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please refer to Session Five, where it was first introduced. This example lesson uses the Slide Talk from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), on weird chores. You can use this slideshow, or make your own to elicit students’ preferences on any topic that you are required to teach, or that you want to address. This is a good chance to “angle” the input to work with any required vocabulary to which you might need or want to expose students.

As you discuss the images that students submitted to the slideshow (for Slide Talk), or the sketches they made on the cards (for Card Talk), you might have the class fill out a graphic organizer “Talking Heads in a Row” Graphic Organizer

to keep track of the details of their classmates’ preferences. There are many possibilities for graphic organizers you might use but this

lesson uses the “Talking Heads in a Row” format, which is a good option for any discussion format (such as Slide/Card Talk) that elicits multiple perspectives on a topic.

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Your Guided Oral Input might go something like this today:

“Class, look (gesture) at the slides (place your hand on the slideshow).”

“Look (gesture) at Catherine’s (place your hand under the name) slide.”

“Catherine has (gesture)… Has (gesture) means has (gesture). Show me has (gesture).

Show me thinks (gesture). Show me looks (gesture). Show me likes (gesture). Show me loves (gesture). Show me has (gesture).”

“Catherine (place your hand under the name) has (gesture) a cat (place your hand under the picture on the slide to establish the meaning of “cat”).”

“Who in the class (gesture) has (gesture) a cat (place your hand under the picture)?”

“Catherine, look (gesture)! One, two…(counting in the course language )…twelve people in the class have (gesture) a cat (place your hand under the picture).”

“Does Catherine LOVE (gesture) changing the litter (place your hand under the picture on the slide)?”

“Yes, class, Catherine DOES NOT (gesture) love (gesture) changing the litter. Does she HATE (gesture) changing the litter (place your hand under the picture on the slide)?”

“Yes, class, Catherine HATES (gesture) changing the litter (place your hand under the picture on the slide). Who in the class (gesture) LOVES (gesture) changing the litter (point)? ZERO (hold up a “zero” with your hand) people LOVE (gesture) changing the litter (point).

Who in the class (gesture) HATES (gesture) changing the litter (point)? One, two (counting in the course language) nine people HATE (gesture) changing the litter (point). Catherine, look (gesture) at the class (gesture). Nine people (hold up nine fingers or jot 9 on the board) HATE (gesture) changing the litter (point).”

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“Class, does Catherine LOVE (gesture) or NOT LOVE (gesture) her cat?”

“Yes, class, Catherine LOVES (gesture) her cat. Does she LOVE (gesture) changing the litter (point)?”

“Yes, class, Catherine HATES (gesture) changing the litter (point).”

(As time permits, move on to another slide(s) and continue in a similar fashion.)

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many slides you covered, move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. You can return to cover more slides in the next lesson, or later in the second round of Guided Oral Input in a block class.

Quick Quiz Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “Quick Quiz” strategy, see Session One. “OK, time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

Generally I ask between six and ten questions, or even more. But on the first days, you might ask only two or three, or even just one, depending on your class schedule.

You are advised to continue sticking with simple “either-or” or “yes-no” questions, providing two choices, one of which is correct and the other incorrect. Additionally, I recommend that you literally give students the answer as you ask the question, and also provide plenty of “hints” in the form of extra-linguistic information such as vocal inflection, gestures, pointing to visuals, and facial expressions.

After moving to the Review Spot, your quiz might go something like this: “OK, time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, call out the answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, does Catherine LOVE (gesture) …. shhhhh…. or HATE (gesture)… shhhh…changing the litter…..shhhhh? Shhhhh! Does Catherine LOVE (gesture) …. shhhhh…. or HATE (gesture)…shhhh…changing the litter?”

(The class calls out, “HATE!”) “Yes, class! Catherine hates changing the litter.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) Does Catherine LOVE (gesture)…shhhhh…or HATE (gesture) her cat…..shhhh….Does Catherine LOVE (gesture)…shhhhh…or HATE (gesture) her cat?”

(The class calls out, “LOVE!”) “Yes, class! Catherine LOVES (gesture) her cat, but she HATES (gesture) changing the litter.”

Repeat with more questions if time permits.

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Write and Discuss See Session One for a detailed explanation of Write and Discuss. The example provided below will, of course, differ from your class’s text. You will still most likely find that you only have time to write three or four sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are still building the foundation in these first lessons, and even throughout the year(s) you might routinely only write a few sentences in any given Shared Writing session, so that you have time for the other lesson components in the daily instructional framework.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Write: Our Chores. We love Say: We love (gesture) cats…or we love (gesture) changing the litter?

Students: CATS! Say and write: We love cats. C-A-T-S. Write: Catherine has Say: Does Catherine have one (hold up one finger) cat or three (hold up three fingers) cats?

Class: One! Say: Yes, Catherine has…(writing and spelling) O-N-E-space-C-A-T. Reading/Recycling: Our Chores. We love cats. Catherine has one cat.

Say and write: Catherine’s cat is named Say: Is Catherine’s cat named Sojo or Buttercup?

Students: Sojo!

Say and write: Catherine’s cat is named (writing and spelling) S-O-J-O. Catherine Say: Does Catherine LOVE (gesture) Sojo or does she NOT LIKE (gesture) Sojo?

Students: LOVE! Say and write: Catherine LOVES her cat, (say “comma” in the course language) Sojo.

Say: How many (gesture) people in the class have (gesture) a cat? One (hold up one finger)? Two (hold up two fingers)? Three (hold up three fingers)? How many (gesture) people have (gesture) a cat? One (hold up one finger person)? Two (hold up two fingers) people? How many (gesture)?

Students: Nine!

Say and write: Nine people in our class have a cat Say: Does the class LOVE (gesture) or HATE (gesture) changing the litter?

Students: HATE! Say and write: Nine people in our class have a cat, (say “comma” in the course language) but we HATE (gesture) changing the litter.

Reading/Recycling: Our Chores. We love cats. Catherine has one cat. Catherine’s cat is named Sojo.

Catherine loves her cat. Nine people in our class have a cat, but we HATE changing the litter.

Time permitting, you might write more or less.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies You will work with the text that your class created together using the three “Go-To” strategies (or, for block classes, perhaps four strategies, if time permits). Today, Shared Reading might sound something like this: Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words) Our Chores. We love cats. Catherine has one cat.

Catherine’s cat is named Sojo. Catherine loves her cat. Nine people in our class have a cat, but we HATE changing the litter.

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Read with the class, not faster, not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s OK; it’s normal. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!” (class reads: our…chores…???) (sensing confusion, you circle the words “nous”.) “This word means “we.” Let’s start over here.” (class reads: our…chores…we…love…the) (remembering that you taught this point in a previous Shared Reading) Good job! You remembered that “les” means “the” and we have to say that in French but we don’t need to say it in English. Nice memories! Let’s start over here.” (class reads: we…love…the…cats…Catherine…has…one…cat…the…cat…???) (sensing confusion, you circle the words “of”) “This word means “of.” In French, we have to say “the cat of Catherine” because there is no “apostrophe s” in French. We always have to say “of the person” like here, “the cat of Catherine.” In Engish, we usually would say, “Catherine’s cat.” That’s not an option in French.

There is no “apostrophe s” in French. Let’s start over here.” (class reads: the…cat…of…Catherine…is named…Sojo…Catherine…loves…???) (sensing confusion, you circle the words “son”) “This word means “her.” Let’s start over here.” (class reads: Catherine…loves…her…cat…nine…people…in…our…class…have…a…cat….but…we… hate….changing…the….litter.)

Continue in this fashion, time permitting.

Grammar Discussion

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“Nice work reading! Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: (You have walked to the back of the room) You will most likely find that since you have been doing the same sequence of Shared Reading strategies all year to this point, you can simply move to the reading from the back of the room spot and begin asking questions, without needing to speak in English to transition. Your specific questions will vary.

Again, this is a major benefit of using a daily instructional framework and re-using the same instructional strategies; you can begin to simply deploy the familiar strategies with less and less English to set up and reinforce the activity each day, as students learn the expectation. Moving to various locations in the classroom to conduct the various repeated lesson components helps to cue students that you are moving to the next step in the lesson.

Q and A Game For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please see Session Six in which it was first introduced.

Students will find a partner, or you will partner them up as described in Session 6. Today’s Q and A Game might sound something like this: “Get with a partner.”

(Students get with a partner in whatever way you have chosen.)

“Decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “You will decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (once half the class is raising their hand) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.”

“Partner A, what is the name of Catherine’s cat? What is the name of Catherine’s cat?”

(Partner As are talking, Partner Bs are counting. After about 20 seconds, it is usually time to move on.)

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“Partner B, does Catherine love changing the litter or hate changing the litter? Does Catherine love changing the litter or hate changing the litter?”

(Switch back to Partner A and continue on in this manner if time permits.)

At the end of the period, you might to debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 9

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write words or phrases in French to describe preferences and write longer sentences using transition words to say more Intermediate: write two or more sentences in French to describe preferences, using transition words to say more Advanced: write a paragraph in French to to describe preferences, using transition words to say more and organize your paragraph

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now. You will benefit greatly from their services when you come to the Narration cycle, which is not too far away — session 16! See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or read a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Show Me Your (Writing) Moves In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Two, shown here, in French.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

French Beginner Text - Brochure

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Anchor Charts Now we will move on to the lesson procedures. Today, you will begin using an “Anchor Chart.” Basically, an Anchor Chart is a tool that you will use to collect lists of useful words/terms that can be used to perform a certain language function. In this case, the language function is “Writing More” (i.e. using conjunctions to write longer, more complex sentences). You will create the anchor chart with your class, adding elements to it as you teach. You will only add one or two new items to the list in any given lesson, so that students see the new terms added in manageable chunks, and within a meaningful communicative context. This makes the learning “stickier,” and increases the chances that students will uptake the new language.

Additionally, since an Anchor Chart is used again and again, over the course of several lessons, in various contexts, the items on the list are reinforced as you continue to refer back to the chart, using the items Beginning of an Anchor Chart

you previously listed, and add new ones as needed.

On to the lesson procedures.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

“This list of transition words will help us write longer sentences.”

“Writing More (put your hand under the title of the anchor chart)…”et” (“and” in French) (write in the course language and draw a sketch to show the meaning - for example, a plus sign)…”mais” (“but” in French) (write in the Adding to an Anchor Ch

art

course language and draw a sketch to show the meaning - for example, arrows to denote “opposite”)”

(read the text in the course language) “OK, in Québec, they eat (gesture) beans with bacon. They eat white beans (point) and (point to “and” on the anchor chart) black beans (point).”

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “They eat white beans AND black beans.”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

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Repeat with a couple of other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text.

After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then the Community Survey.

Community Survey (Preferences: School Subjects) It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

For the Community Survey, you might prepare a slideshow or other graphic. In this example, I simply show how to tabulate the responses on the board.

“OK, class, you talked (gesture)…talked (gesture) means talked (gesture). Show me talked (gesture). Show me looked (gesture). Show me thought (gesture).

Show me loved (gesture). Show me talked (gesture).

You talked (gesture) to teachers (write “teachers” on the grid in the course language).”

“I am a teacher (write your name and spell in the course language) H-A-R-G-A-D-E-N. Other (gesture) teachers?” (some students may call out names of teachers) “Yes, Ms. Jones is a teacher. (write and spell) J-O-N-E-S. Ms. Smith is a teacher. S-M-I-T-H.” Page 224

You talked (gesture) to teachers (point to the word) like Ms. Jones (point to name on the grid), and Ms. Smith (point). Who in the class (gesture) talked (gesture) to Ms. Jones (point)? One, two (counting in the course language). Five people talked (gesture) to Ms. Jones. Who in the class (gesture) talked (gesture) to Ms. Smith (point)? One, two (counting in the course language). Three people talked (gesture) to Ms. Smith (point).”

“You talked (gesture) to teachers (point) … Ms. Jones, Ms. Smith, and you talked (gesture) to students (write “students” on the grid). Jayden (gesture to a student in class) is a student. Alondra (gesture) is a student.”

Write a subject on the grid in the course language, perhaps spelling as well, and making a simple sketch to establish meaning (unless the meaning is very apparent, as in the case of the word algèbre in French.)

Who in the class (gesture) talked (gesture) to a teacher (point) about algebra (point)? One, two (counting in the course language). 33 people (write 33 on the chart) talked (gesture) to a teacher (point) about algebra (point). Raise your hand (model and perhaps teach “ a gesture for raise your hand” and cycle through previously-learned gestures) if your teacher LIKES (gesture) algebra. One, two (counting in the course language) 21 teachers LIKE algebra. Raise your hand (gesture) if your STUDENT liked (gesture) algebra). One, two (counting).”

How many teachers (point) LOVE (gesture) algebra? How many students (point) LOVE (gesture) algebra?”

Continue on in a similar manner, working your way through several options, time permitting. You might not get to all of the results; that is OK. After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how much of the information you covered, move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. You could choose to come back to the Community Survey in follow-up lessons, or later in the second round of Guided Oral Input in a block class, to process more of the data, or simply process what you have time for now.

Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “Finish My Sentence” strategy, see Session Five.

“OK, we are going to play a game called ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact from what we just learned, in French, and then you will all speak in French as much as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts that we learned, or add on other facts that you know. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone Page 225

is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point. If you cannot keep talking in French for the whole six seconds, I will get a point.”

“Number One (hold up one finger). We talked (gesture) to 34 teachers and…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “love algebra, hate math,” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Six! Good job, a point for the class!”

(Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Number Two (hold up two fingers). We talked (gesture) to 35 students and…”

(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

Repeat, if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue working with the anchor chart that you set ”

A “Goal Box

up during Reading Workshop. This first day that you begin using anchor charts, I recommend simply using the words or phrases that you already added to the chart during Reading Workshop. You might want to make a “goal box” on the top of your Shared Writing text, and challenge the class to use the “goal words” a certain number of times in the writing, as modeled below.

The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. Furthermore, the actual contents of

your Anchor Chart and Goal Box may well vary from the example, depending on what fit your lesson and goals. Within the “writing goal” of “saying more” (i.e. using conjunctions to write compound sentences), there are, of course, many possible words or phrases that might be used.

I have used the very simple examples of “and” and “but” in this beginner lesson. If your students already use conjunctions like these regularly and consistently, without prompting or reminders, you might use other conjunctions or transitions instead of the very simple examples provided. For beginners, these will most likely be “complex” enough at this point in the year.

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With the addition of an Anchor Chart today, you will most likely find that you only have time to write two or three sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are still building the foundation in these first lessons, and you are introducing a very powerful tool: the Anchor Chart.

The specific lesson example given here models how to use an Anchor Chart the first time you do so.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language on your Shared Writing paper or digital file) is to write more (point to the title of the chart) and today our goal is to use these words (write “mais” and “but” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: Our Survey of Say: Did we talk (gesture) to teachers, or did we talk (gesture) to students or did we talk (gesture) to teachers AND students?

Students: Teachers AND students!

Say: Our Survey of…(writing and spelling in French) T-E-A-C-H-E-R-S and S-T-U-D-E-N-T-S Ooh! AND! (give the class a check mark in the goal box).

Good job!

Reading/Recycling: Our survey of teachers and students Write: We talked (gesture) to Say: Did we talk (gesture) to three (hold up three fingers) teachers or did we talk to 34 (point/jot “34”) teachers?

Class: 34!

Say: Yes, we talked (gesture) to (writing in French) 34 teachers, and (give the class a check mark in the goal box) (nice job!) and…we talked (gesture) to…how many students?

Class: 35!

Say/write: 35 students Reading/Recycling: Our survey of teachers and students. We talked to 34 teachers and we talked to 35 students.

Say: How many teachers love (gesture) algebra? Two (hold up fingers) or 21 (point or jot “21”)?

Class: 21!

Say/write: 21 teachers…liked (gesture) or loved (gesture) algebra?

Class: Liked!

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Say/write: 21 teachers liked algebra. And? But? Class: But! And! But! (opinions may vary) Say/write: 21 teachers liked algebra, (say “comma” in the course language) but (give the class a check mark in the goal box) (nice job!) but…how many students liked (gesture) algebra?

Class: Three!

Say/write: 21 teachers like algebra, (say “comma” in the course language) but three students like algebra.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another conjunction comes up naturally as you write, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. You will add one to two words or phrases to the class’s Anchor Chart in each lesson that you work with it. Thus, one class might have slightly different conjunctions on their chart, because their Shared Writing might have been better-suited to one particular conjunction while another class’s Shared Writing may have used a different one.

This is OK; the Stepping Stones framework is designed to be flexible in the specific language. The overall learning goal is to “say more” or “use conjunctions” or “write more complex sentences,” NOT to learn specific conjunctions.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions. Lifting the training wheels…off you go!

Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words, read the text in its entirety.)

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s OK; it’s normal. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!”

Grammar Discussion “Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: You will most likely find that since you have been doing the same sequence of Shared Reading strategies all year to this point, you can simply move to the reading from the back of the room spot and begin asking

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questions, without needing to speak in English to transition. Your specific questions will vary depending on the content of the class discussion.

Write Inside the Story Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. You can have them work in a notebook or folder, in their portfolios, or on a piece of paper that they can turn in on the way out the door after class. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

Write Inside the Story is a strategy that helps students practice and “play with” the new language on the Anchor Chart, and (in later lessons when you have accumulated a list of more terms on the Anchor Chart) to review/reinforce the previous language. You will ask students to copy the Shared Writing text (if they have not already done so during Shared Writing) and add to the class’s writing, using terms from the anchor chart to “improve” the text.

“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more facts in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might model with a sentence as shown above.)

Give students time to work on their writing, perhaps working with a partner, if you think that will be helpful to them. You might notice as students work that they are referring back to the Anchor Chart and the Shared Writing text. This is actually the point of the strategy, more than “practicing” the writing move or using the words/phrases from the chart. The point is that it forces students to re-engage with the written language in a new way. By re-organizing and re-using the language from Shared Writing, students are moving into higherorder thinking and problem-solving, even in a language that is new for them.

At the end of the period, you might to debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 10

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to describe people in class and write longer sentences using transition words to say more Intermediate: write two or more sentences in French to describe people in class, using transition between sentences to say more Advanced: write a paragraph in French to to describe people in class, using transition words to say more and organize your paragraph Preparation The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Visual Lecture. This is basically a strategy in which you present information and lead a class discussion, using visual scaffolding. This might be a slideshow or other resource that you have prepared, or it might be as simple as drawing in front of the students as you speak, on a piece of chart paper, under your document camera, or on the board. In the example lesson, I will use the Visual Lecture from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) called “I’m Like That,” which presents a series of images with various terms to describe people’s personalities.

When preparing the lecture, if you plan to draw as you speak, you will most likely want to print or write the most important points in large letters, so that you can refer to it as you deliver the lesson. It is also a good idea to spend some time rehearsing your delivery. As you rehearse, you might find it useful to use a piece of paper to represent your whiteboard and draw/write on it in the same way that you intend to do during the lesson. Some teachers find it useful to hold a copy of the written facts, while others prefer to use the paper on which they have planned the drawings and other visual supports.

Draw the information as it unfolds, sentence by sentence and detail by detail. This is much more engaging than simply presenting it to the students in already-completed pictures or slides. Seeing the teacher draw on the board as the lesson unfolds is key to the process. You do not have to be an amazing artist. Quick sketches are best, as they keep the plot line moving along. Two books are recommended to you if you find yourself in need of help with your drawing skills -- Make a World by Ed Emberly and Chalk Talks by Norma Shapiro. They present very simple templates for many different drawings.

The most important factor when practicing is: How will you make the information comprehensible to the students? You do NOT need to worry about teaching them each word in the story. Students do not need to comprehend each and every word in the story in order to acquire the language. They DO need to understand the messages that the language is delivering. So, the goal is to make the storyline comprehensible and give the students what Dr. Krashen calls “the illusion of transparency” - the feeling of following the plot of the story.

In order to do this, you might want to consider several supports to aid in their comprehension: Page 230

1. Writing cognates on the board so that students can “see” the English inside the L2 word 2. Writing L2 and L1 on the board (translation) 3. Sketching stick figures to represent the characters and action, for instance, changing a character’s face from smiling to frowning to denote a change in emotion.

4. Using voice intonation and gestures to enhance the students’ understanding of the information.

If you plan to prepare a slideshow or other digital format, you will still want to go bit by bit, beginning with an almost-blank slide, as shown to the left, so that each slide adds a little more information, instead of presenting it all at once on a slide that is chock-full of information.

Regardless of the method you choose to deliver the lecture, it is of the utmost importance to speak slowly and simply, even if it means delivering far less information than you wish. Your primary objective is to make the messages understandable. Go with understandable, simple facts. You will also want to think through how the information will be built piece by piece.

The example used in this lesson is a slideshow called “I’m Like That” which contains a series of images that describe personality traits.

This is a very simple Visual Lecture; they can be more complicated, but this is a good way to get your feet wet.

If you want to try your hand at sketching as you speak, you will simply want to plan ahead to build the images bit by bit as you add details, as shown in the images below.

Look at this line.

Some people like to be alone.

Some people like to relax alone.

Some people are introverted.

Some people HATE to be alone.

Some people like to

Some people are

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs. It is especially important to get the Page 231

Videographer job working before you move into stories, in Session 16, so the sooner you start training that position, the better. You will almost certainly want to use the Videographer when you begin stories, to make recordings of the video retells. So, this is an excellent time to get the Videographer trained, if you have not yet done so.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Pronunciation Practice In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Three, shown below, in French. The texts for this phase are “Personal Profiles” about contemporary people who have made an important contribution to the world.

French Extension Resou

rces - Video

French Beginner Text - Personal

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

Again, since the Reading Workshop texts are more challenging in ion Resources

French Extens

- Article

this phase than in the previous phase, we are returning to a familiar

instructional strategy to allow students some time to “settle in” to this phase

and text type, if you are choosing to use our resources. Because this strategy has been explained in detail in Session Three, we will move on to the lesson procedures right away in this session. For more details on this strategy, please review Session Three.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language.

“I will read this personal profile to you in French, about M.C. Solaar, a musical artist who performs in French.” (read in the course language)

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“Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ even more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input.

Quick Calendar Check-In It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Let’s move on to the procedures for this Visual Lecture. “

Look (gesture) at this person.

This person is athletic (place your hand under the word). Class, does this person play tennis (gesture or sketch to establish meaning) or soccer (gesture or sketch)?”

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“Yes, this person is playing tennis (place your hand on the picture). Who in the class (gesture) plays tennis? (counting in the course language) One, two, three…three (hold up three fingers) people play tennis. Who in the class (gesture) is athletic (place your hand under the word)? (counting in the course language) One, two, three…twenty-two (jot “22” on the board) people in the class are athletic. Who is NOT (gesture “no”) athletic? (counting in the course language) One, two, three…three (hold up three fingers) people in our class are NOT (gesture) athletic.”

“Class, look (gesture) at this person. This person is hard-working (place your hand under the word). Class, is this person working on reading (gesture or sketch to establish meaning) or are they working in the science lab (gesture or sketch to establish meaning)?”

“Yes, this person is working in the science lab (place your hand on the picture). Who in the class (gesture) works in a science lab? (counting in the course language) One, two, three…three (hold up three fingers) people work in a science lab. Who in the class (gesture) is hard-working (place your hand under the word)? (counting in the course language) One, two, three…fifteen (jot “15” on the board) people in the class are hardworking. Who is NOT (gesture “no”) hard-working? (counting in the course language) One, two, three… eleven (jot “11”) people in our class are NOT (gesture) hard-working.”

Continue on in a similar manner, working your way through several options, time permitting. You might not get to all of the slides; that is OK. After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how much of the information you covered, move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. You could choose to come back to this strategy in follow-up lessons, or later in the second round of Guided Oral Input in a block class, to process more of the data, or simply process what you have time for now.

Quick Quiz For a detailed explanation of this Scaffolded Oral Review strategy, please see Session One. After moving to the Review Spot, you will say: “OK, time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, twenty-two people …. shhhhh…. in our class…shhhh…are athletic….shhhh….or twenty-two people are…..shhhhh….hard-working…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! Twenty-two people …. shhhhh…. in our class…shhhh…are athletic….shhhh….or twenty-two people are…..shhhhh….hard-working?

(The class calls out, “athletic!”)

“Yes, class! Twenty-two people in our class are athletic.”

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“Number Two. (two fingers) DeZhane is introverted…..shhh….or extraverted….shhhh? Shhh! DeZhane is introverted…shhhh…or extraverted?”

(The class calls out, “Extraverted!”)

“Yes, class! DeZhane is extraverted.”

Ask more questions, if time permits.

A “Goal

Box”

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue working with the anchor chart that you set up in the last lesson. You might add another transition phrase or conjunction that would be useful for the writing goal of “saying more.” You might want to make a “goal box” on the top of your Shared Writing text, and challenge the class to use the “goal words” a certain number of times in the writing.

Continuing on with your Anchor Chart today, you will most likely find that you only have time to write three or four sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you are still building the foundation in these first lessons, and you are still working to establish the use of a very powerful tool: the Anchor Chart.

Your Shared Writing might sound like this today: (Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language, as shown here.)

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language on your Shared Writing paper or digital file) is to write more (point to the title of the chart) and today our goal is to use these words (point to “mais” and “but”) or this word, “or” (add “or” to the anchor chart in the course language).

We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences.

(Write “mais” and “et” and “ou” (and, but, and or) in the goal box in the course language.) OK, let’s go!”

Write: Introverts and Say: Introverts and Hard-working People or Introverts and Extraverts?

Students: Introverts and Extraverts!

Say: Introverts and (Say/write and spell in the course language:) Extraverts E-X-T-R-A-V-E-R-T-S Ooh! AND! (give the class a check mark in the goal box). Good job!

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Reading/Recycling: Introverts and Extraverts Write: Introverts prefer (gesture) Say: Do introverts prefer (gesture) to relax alone (gesture or point to an image to reinforce meaning) or do introverts prefer to relax with friends (gesture or point to an image to reinforce meaning)?

Class: Alone!

Say: Yes, introverts prefer (gesture) to (writing in French) relax alone, (say “comma” in the course language) but? or? and?

Class: BUT! Say/write: but (give the class a check mark in the goal box) Nice job!

Reading/Recycling: Introverts and Extraverts. Introverts prefer to relax alone, BUT (say/write:) extraverts prefer (gesture)…class, do extraverts prefer to relax alone or to relax with friends (gesture or point to an image to reinforce meaning)?

Class: Friends! Relax with friends!

Say/write: to relax with friends (gesture or point to an image to reinforce meaning) Reading/Recycling: Introverts and Extraverts. Introverts prefer to relax alone, BUT extraverts prefer to relax with friends.

Say/write: DeZhane D-E-Z-H-A-N-E is…class, is DeZhane introverted or extraverted?

Class: Extraverted!

Say/write: DeZhane is extraverted…but? and? or?

Class: and!

Say/write: and (give the class a check mark in the goal box) Nice job! DeZhane is extraverted and… athletic? hard-working? calm? creative?

Class: athletic!

Say/write: DeZhane is extraverted and athletic.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another conjunction comes up naturally as you write, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. You will add one to two words or phrases to the class’s Anchor Chart in each lesson that you work with it. Thus, one class might have slightly different conjunctions on their chart, because their Shared Writing might have been better-suited to one particular conjunction while another class’s Shared Writing may have used a different one.

This is OK; the Stepping Stones framework is designed to be flexible in the specific language. The overall learning goal is to “say more” or “use conjunctions” or “write more complex sentences,” NOT to learn specific conjunctions.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

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True-False Quiz After moving to the Quiz Spot, you will say: “OK, time for a review quiz. It is true (gesture thumbs up) and false (gesture thumbs down).”

You have already used this strategy several times in the previous sessions. However, you might still need to write the words for “true” and “false” in your language on the board, or have signs or other visual aids ready to use, or use gestures, for example, saying, “Show me true, show me false” to help your students recognize the thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture you are using.

“Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. LOTS (gesture) of people….shhhh…. in our class are athletic (gesture)….shhhhh….True (gesture/ visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…LOTS (gesture) of people in our class are athletic (gesture).”

(The class calls out, “TRUE!”) “Yes, TRUE, lots of people in this class are athletic!”

“Question Two. (hold up two fingers) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. Marc is….shhhh…. studious (gesture) and serious (gesture)….shhhhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…Marc is….shhhh…. studious (gesture) and serious (gesture)?

(Students call out "TRUE!”) “Yes, true (gesture). Marc is studious and serious.”

Repeat with more true-false questions if time permits.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 11

Objective: By the end of class you will be able to…

Beginner: write sentences in French to describe a character that the class makes and write longer sentences using transition words to say more Intermediate: write two or more sentences in French to describe a character that the class makes, using transition between sentences to say more Advanced: write a paragraph in French to to describe a character that the class makes, using transition words to say more and organize your paragraph

Preparation You will most likely want to assign students the task, either for homework or at the end of class during one of the lessons in this session (Session 11), of submitting a picture of one of their heroes to the class slideshow, to use in Session 12, Heroes Picture Talk.

Today, you will create a One Word Image. This is a process in which you create a character with the class, starting with one word, in the stronger shared language, to give the “species” of the character, e.g. a burrito, or a cookie, or a flower, or a pig. Most students and teachers really enjoy making these characters, and so you will most likely want to make at least two or three before moving on to the next session. There are a couple of options (and probably more that I don’t know about yet) for creating these adorable One Word Images ma

de in a slideshow

characters.

You can make a One Word Image “from scratch,” simply imagining that it is there in the classroom with you and your class, and asking questions to establish its size, color, emotional state, personality, etc. When making the character “from scratch,” most teachers have their class artist(s) draw the character as the class decides on its details.

One Word Image made “from scratch” in class

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You can also use a slideshow to create the character, as modeled in the example lesson, using slides from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff). These slides, like most of our materials, are available in multiple languages. When using a slideshow, you might have your artist(s) work digitally, in the slideshow, to assemble the character from the components provided.

Aren’t they cute? Most teachers and kids really enjoy One Word Images, and maybe you are starting to see why! It gets better, too, when you get to the Narration cycle and use them in stories!

So, let’s go!

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs. It is especially important to get the Videographer job working before you move into stories, in Session 16, so the sooner you start training that position, the better. You will almost certainly want to use the Videographer when you begin stories, to make recordings of the video retells. So, this is an excellent time to get the Videographer trained, if you have not yet done so.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

French Beginner Text - Personal Profile

Show Me Your (Writing) Moves In the example lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Three, shown here in French. The texts for this phase are “Personal Profiles” about contemporary people who have made an important contribution to the world. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the most comprehensible.

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Extension Resources - Videos

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use black text. The class’s stronger shared language is written in this color.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

We will use the “Show Me Your (Writing) Moves” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today. The modeled lesson uses the text from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), but, as stated above, you can use any text, and this strategy will be just as effective. This strategy was first introduced in Session 9, and you can find a more detailed explanation in that session.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this personal profile to you in French, about Autumn Peltier, an Indigenous Canadian activist who is fighting for the right to clean, healthy water. We will continue using this list of transition words to help us write longer sentences.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, if you have set that job up, which I strongly suggest you do this week, if you still have not done so.)

“Writing More (put your hand under the title of the anchor chart)…et (place your hand under the word and any symbols you drew beside it to reinforce its meaning)…mais (place your hand under the word and any symbols you drew beside it to reinforce its meaning)…(adding a new term to the chart) parce que (sketch a symbol and/or add a translation in the stronger shared language (this example French term - parce que means “because” in English) to establish meaning).”

(read the text in the course language)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “OK, Autumn Peltier was born in Canada (point to the text that contains this information). When was she born? 2004 (point to the text that contains this information) or 2001 (hold up one finger or jot “2001” to establish meaning)? Was she born in 2004 or 2001?” (the class responds, “2004!”)

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“Yes, she was born in (writing in the course language) 2004, and (point to “and” on the anchor chart) she is (point back to the text to indicate that students should refer to it)…she is…a girl? an activist?” (the class responds, “activist!” or “She is an activist!”)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “She was born in Canada in 2004, and (point to “and” on the anchor chart) she is an activist. Is she an environmental (point back to the text to indicate that students should refer to it) activist or a political activist or a social justice activist?”

Note: I am choosing the terms “political” and “social justice” because I know that these are almost perfectmatch cognates in French. If I needed to use words that were not perfectly matched, I could sketch, write the translation, or teach a gesture for these new terms. Most likely, though, in the interest of simplicity and comprehensibility for my students, I would skip the additional choices (“political” or “social justice” and simply ask, “Is she an environmental activist, yes or no?”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin working on your One Word Image.

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Quick Calendar Check-In It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Move on to make your One Word Image. Since this is the first time you will be making a character with your class, you might want to explain the process first, speaking in the class’s stronger shared language.

“We are going to make a character today, using this slideshow.

We will start with one word - its “species” - and then work together, using our imaginations, to describe its details, its size, color, and its personality, etc. First, let’s look at some examples of characters, of various “species” or kinds.”

Here are the slides that are included in the sample slideshow.

“Species”

Size

Color

Emotion(s)

Personality

Motivation(s)

(If you spoke in the stronger shared language to preview the activity, you might have your Class Starter give the “French” signal again, or simply take a deep breath and begin speaking in the language.)

“OK, class, look (gesture). The “species” of the character (place your hand under the word “character” on the slide). This is a pencil (point), and this is paper (point) and these are boots (point). One (hold up one finger) or two (hold up two fingers) boots?” (the class calls out, “Two!”) “Yes, there are two (hold up two fingers and/or count in the language) boots. And this is an apple (point).”

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(moving on to the slides with the various “species” organized into categories (e.g. school supplies, household objects, etc.)

“Look (gesture) at this rice (point to a “species” of character on one of the slides), and this ice cream, and this apple…think (gesture)…do you want (gesture)…”

“Want means “want” (gesture). Show me “want” (gesture). (cycling through previously-taught gestures) “Show me “look” (gesture). “Think” (gesture). Show me “prefer” (gesture). “Has” (gesture) “Likes” (gesture) Show me “loves” (gesture). Show me “want” (gesture).” (returning to the One Word Image process) You want (gesture) the rice (point)?

You want (gesture) the apple (point)? You prefer (gesture) ice cream (point)?”

Sometimes, a class can really get into the selection of the object, and it could take till the end of the year for them to choose. If this is the case in one or more of your classes, you might want to stop and assign the class job of “Profe 2” or “Teacher Helper” or “Decider.” For more information on the class jobs, including the job description for “Profe 2,” please see the HR Manual in the Appendices.

“Iit looks like we could debate this pretty much all the way till summer break. But we don’t have time for all that debating, and all this English is taking away from the French time. Basically, I don’t really have a preference; all I want to do is speak French to you! So, I need a student to decide for the class, when you are debating and can’t make a quick decision, so we can get back to French.”

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“Placing” the object on

the floor

Once the class has chosen the “species,” you will want to “place” the object (which is invisible/imaginary) in a specific location in the classroom. You might “place” it in the middle of the floor, on a table, on a chair, etc.

It is important to “stick” the object - invisible though it is - in a specific place and return to it as if it were really there.

This is very helpful in establishing its “imaginary reality.” The “realer” you can make the experience, the more your students are likely to enjoy the process, and engage with you in the Land of French MakeBelieve, so you are not the only one heading to Weirdville on Clown Airlines!

You know it seems real when your Videographer takes video of the invisible object on the floor!

Imagine your class has chosen to imagine a backpack. First, establish its location in the room and its “imaginary reality.” The key to doing this successfully is to direct a lot of energy towards that spot, and to encourage the students to do so as well. The more collective energy you can focus on the pretend object, before you begin working with it, by taking a minute here to really get everyone to look at it as if it were actually there, the better the lesson tends to go.

“Class, look (gesture) at the backpack (gesture towards the spot with a very purposeful, meaningful gesture, as if you really see it sitting there). Think (gesture) about the backpack (model thinking and looking at the invisible backpack with some intensity). Look (gesture) at it (model looking). Think (gesture) about it (model thinking and staring at it with all your might).”

Note: You do not yet know how big the object “actually” is, so you want to have it be “definitely imaginarily there and glued to the spot” and picture it as its real-life, actual size. So, for the example of a backpack, you would begin by looking at a spot about two feet across and three feet tall, on the floor in front of you, or on a stool or table. It can get pretty “real!” See the photos from my classroom below.

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After you have “planted” the object in its spot, move on to establish the details about it, beginning with color.

“Think (gesture) about the backpack (point to its spot). What color is it?

Red (point to something red, perhaps an object in the room, a marker, a poster, and/or the slide)? Black (point to something black)? Green (point to something green)?

What color is the backpack? Red (point)? Blue (point)? Pink (point)? Black (point)? What color is the backpack?”

Look at its spot, with intensity as if you are simply DYING of curiosity to know what color this pretend backpack is.

Your Profe 2 can help decide, if there is a lot of debate. You might decide on more than one color, and perhaps decide if the top is blue and the bottom is red, or if the bottom is blue and the top is red, or if it is light blue or dark blue, or also ask about patterns (dots, stripes, etc.). Once the color(s) have been established, move on to the size.

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This example slide is from the One Word Image slideshow available on our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff). It uses a cake to help scaffold comprehension of the word “size” and can be used in class to compare the size of the object you are working with.

“Class, is the backpack big (stretch it from the spot it is “attached” to) or small (shrink it down to the floor/table in the spot it is “attached” to)?”

Your Profe 2 can help decide, if there is a lot of debate.

“Look (gesture) at the HUGE backpack!”

The more you can ham it up here, the better. A “trick” I have found useful is stepping back and gazing upon the invisible object with all the rapt, wondrous attention you can muster, given that it does not actually exist. The key to this trick is to “run your eyes around the outline,” meaning that you dramatically look at it from top to bottom and side to side, as you describe its prodigious size (or, if it is tiny, its adorable diminutiveness).

If the class determines that the object is very small, I like to “pick it up” and place it on a stool or desk, for “safekeeping” so I don’t step on it. A side benefit is that I can maintain as much of my dignity as possible, and not have to scurry about on the floor interacting with a tiny, microscopic piece of toast...fun though that does sound…

Just kidding; let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger or sprier.

This is an excellent time to recycle the information you already established, and check in with your artists. The artists are not only producing a very useful, super-engaging image of the character, which no one can see until the whole process is over (which builds suspense and interest) but they also give you the perfect excuse to repeat and recycle the facts of the One Word Image several times, in an unforced, natural way.

To get two repetitions for the price of one, first review the information with the class at large. In the example that follows, you will see three “tricks” to do this effortlessly. One is the “Forgetting on Purpose” trick, another is the “Well, Almost” trick, and the final trick is “Checking in with the Artist(s).”

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Let’s look at the first “trick.” You begin by recycling/restating/reviewing the facts you already know, perhaps also asking questions as demonstrated in the passage below. Then, for the last fact, you make a statement that you know is not correct, and allow the class to correct you.

“Class, look (gesture) at the backpack (point to its spot). It is very big (gesture). Is it small or is it big?” (the class says, “Big!”) “Yes, it is big. It is big, and its color is green.”

In reality, the class decided that it is red. You are using the “Forgetting on Purpose” Trick here. You know it is red, but this trick helps engage your students and allows you to restate the information without it seeming contrived. Say the erroneous fact with as much certainty as you can, which heightens the illusion of the teacher forgetting. This makes the trick more engaging for your students, as they will generally feel the need to correct you and set you straight, right away. You might even begin to find them arguing back with you in the course language, without even thinking about it, because they are so wrapped up in the communication.

(The class says, “It is red!” or “Its color is red!” or perhaps simply, “NO!” You will pretend to need their corrections, in order to get more repetitions of the language.)

“Its color is NOT green?” (The class says, “It is red!”)

“Its color is green? Or red?” (The class says, “Red!”) “Oh! Its color is NOT green! It is red! Not green!”

You can also try your hand at the “Well, Almost” Trick as you recycle, prior to consulting with your artists.

“Class, look (gesture) at the backpack (point). Think (gesture)…is it small, or big?”

(The class says, “It is big!” In reality, the class has already determined that it was very big.)

“No, no, class, look (gesture) at the backpack (point). LOOK (gesture) at it!”

Run your eyes over the object, really dramatizing the fact that it is really BIG! by “measuring” it with your hand, or walking around it and gawking up at it in stupefaction, as illustrated here.

“Is the backpack big, class?”

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(The class says, “It is big!” or “YES!” If they are annoyed or frustrated, you’re doing this trick right. You are activating their emotions, which aids in memory. Plus, most students do enjoy a chance to feel like they know something you - the teacher- don’t know!)

“Class...NO! It is NOT big!” (It is your turn to pretend-act annoyed or frustrated!). “The backpack is… (dramatic pause)…VERY (gesture) big (gesture)! Is it BIG (gesture) or VERY BIG (gesture)?”

(The class says, relieved that this ordeal is finally over, “VERY big!”)

Note: Since this is the first lesson in which you are using artist(s), it is a good idea to supervise them. Also, checking in with them is another clever trick to squeeze in more repetitions of the same information.

“Tricks” to get in more repetitions of the language in a natural, purposeful way are extremely valuable in comprehension-based language teaching. If you were to just simply stand and deliver the information again to recycle everything that you already discussed, that would be boring to listen to.

Since you are ostensibly checking in with the artists, the repetitions seem “real” and meaningful. Plus, walking over to nonchalantly peer at the art, and discuss it with the artists, and drop some tantalizing little hints like, “WOW, it IS big!” as you are speaking to the artists can do wonders to heighten students’ engagement with the lesson.

Because no one else has yet been allowed to see the art, students are generally quite eager to see it, and thus listen and watch this review quite attentively, hoping to see a glimpse of the art before the big reveal. You will want to speak to your artist(s) “to the side” but not quietly; this is theatre. That is to say that you are not speaking only to the artists. You want the whole class to hear. For that reason, you are advised to not turn away from the rest of the class.

My artists’ easel is set up in the front of my room, facing away from the class, as The “Big Reveal” of the

shown in the diagram below, so that the artwork is hidden, and also so I can easily stand behind the artists and still face the rest of the class as I speak to

“them” so that the class can “eavesdrop” on what was never intended to be a private conversation. It just looks like it was supposed to be for the artists; benefit.

The real reason for these little check-ins, especially once I have worked with the same artists for several weeks or months, is not to train or check in with the artists. It is to gain an opportunity to repeat the same facts and information yet again, without having to pretend that there is a “reason” for all this repetition. It just makes sense that of course I would need to repeat and check in with the artists.

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The Front of My Classroom

Because this is not really a private conversation, to help keep the class focused on what you are saying to the artists, you might want to try some of the “teacher positioning” tips here. First, you will want to stand so that you are partially or even fully facing the class, even if it means that you are not actually facing the artists to whom you are, ostensibly, speaking. You might need to pivot from facing the artists, as shown in the diagram below, so that you can see their work, to facing the class, so you can project your voice and “emote” to the class more easily.

You might also move away

“Pivoting” to face the cla

ss

from the artists as you conduct this short check-in. This is a very brief conversation, despite all the words I am spilling to describe it. It is taking far longer to explain the process than it will to actually conduct the check-in.

In an actual class, this will take only about one to two minutes, depending on the amount of information you have established during the previous Guided Oral Input. In many classes, the general population will become restless if you plant yourself right beside the artists’ easel and get involved in this “private” check-in with only one or two people in class, the artist(s).

For this reason, you may want to begin the check-in standing right by the easel, but then move away from the artist(s), continuing to speak and gesture back to them, as you calmly meander to the other side of the room.

This way, you can stand beside any students whose attention may be wandering, circulate among the rest of the class, and maintain a higher degree of visual interest, as students will need to shift their attention and their eyes’ focus from you, to the artist(s) at the easel, and back to you. This shifting eye gaze helps to re-focus students’ attention.

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Moving across the room as you che

ck in with the artist(s)

In order to ensure that you set up and maintain the expectation that even when you appear to be having a private check-in with the artist(s), students will need to continue to pay attention to the communication in the course language, you will want to make sure that you continue to enforce the Classroom Rules as you carry on this brief conversation. So, even if you are deep into restating for your artist(s) one of the finer points of exactly how gigantic this backpack is, continually monitor the rest of the class for side conversations or drifting attention, and interrupt the check-in right away, to address any disruptions.

An Important Note on Classroom Management As in any other moment of class. during which there is language input to attend to (basically, most of class), you will want to be very mindful of stopping your instruction - even this “private” conversation - at the slightest disruption, and walk to the rules poster, and place your hand under the rule that you want to reinforce, and deploy Old Faithful (Plan A of the Classroom Management plan outlined in Chapter Four) with the exact same old predictable old same-old-same-old boring Queen Victoria Stare you have been using since day one.

If you allow students’ attention to falter during the first couple of check-ins with your artist(s), you will soon find that you have inadvertently established the expectation - not through your words, but through your lack of action - that it is actually fine for the rest of the class to take a mental vacation as you check in with the artist(s). If that happens, you will have destroyed the effectiveness of this “trick” because the class will not actually be listening to the

“Old Faithfu l”

repetitions as you review the artwork.

So, please, when you do choose to begin the “Checking in with the Artist(s) Trick,” be sure to not let up on the rest of the class, so that you can continue to use this very handy trick to gain easy, low-effort repetitions of the language from Guided Oral Input for the rest of the year, whenever you have your artist(s) working.

This trick is language teacher gold.

Guard it well, and your students’ language will grow rich off the extra repetitions!

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After you have established the color and the size of the object, you can move on to the details of its emotions and personality. If you do not have time during Guided Oral Input on the first day that you make a One Word Image, that is OK. You can create a perfectly satisfying character that your students will likely find emotionally engaging, just by establishing its color and size. The schedule for this phase (Cycle One (Description), Phase Three, Describing People Inside and Out) contains multiple lessons using this strategy, so the next time you make another character, you will probably get to more questions, because the process will be more familiar and you will not have to spend so much time setting the activity up, hiring artists, etc.

For me, the most fun part of the One Word Image process is establishing the object’s emotions and personality. However, please do not feel pressure to get through all the questions today. As stated above, you can make that your goal for subsequent lessons. As with every lesson using the Daily Instructional Framework, you will not want to linger too, too long in the Guided Oral Input, even though it can be super-tempting, especially when the discussion is interesting and students are engaged and enjoying the activity.

To establish the character’s emotion(s), you might use a graphic like the one shown here, or use the collection of faces on the slideshow. You do not actually need any kind of prepared visual to support comprehension of the emotions, however, because they are quite easy to demonstrate, using body language, gestures, and - above all - facial expression and tone of voice. Your discussion might go something like this example: “Class, how is the backpack feeling? Happy (gesture or point to a visual)? Sad (gesture or point to a visual)? How is the backpack feeling?”

Note: By immediately giving two (or more) options that are possible answers to the question “How is it feeling,” you support students’ comprehension of the question, even if they have never before “studied” or even been exposed to the language in the question.

Even if students do not understand any of the question, the first time you ask it, when you immediately give them options (e.g. “happy, or VERY happy, sad, or nervous, or angry”) they can easily deduce what you were asking, and successfully answer the question, even if they did not understand it the first time.

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Notice, too, that in the example above, the teacher asks the question, immediately gives two options (happy or sad), and then restates the question again, so that students can hear it after having been given possible answers, so that they are more likely to understand the meaning if the question the second time they hear it.

Another important note is that when you say the emotions, you should make an effort to visibly “emote” or “empathize” with the object, as if you could actually see it, and it were feeling that emotion, and you, being the sweet, sympathetic person that you are, really feel for it, and share its emotions, and show them in your facial expression, body language, and tone of voice.

“Emoting” to a tin

In the images here, you can see two examples: one is “emoting” to a tiny object

y object

that you can “pick up” and “hold” in your hands, and the other is “emoting” to a large object, that you have to “look up to” in order to “see” its facial expression.

After you have established the emotion(s) of the object, you might recycle back through all the details you already know. This buys your artists some time to add the emotions to their drawing, and also reinforces the new information and language that you have used so far in the Guided Oral Input.

You might continue on - time permitting - to discuss the object’s personality.

“Emoting” to a

large object

Again, you can simply ask the question, pointing to the words in the course language (and perhaps also in the stronger shared language, especially if the words you will use in the course language are cognates, like the French examples of “optimiste” and “pessimiste” or “timide” and “sociable” given here) and then give two (or more) options, using gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions to reinforce the meaning of the new terms, as shown in these images.

Your discussion might go something like this: “Class, think (gesture) about the backpack’s personality (place your hand under the word “personality” and, if it is not a cognate in your course language, write in the class’s stronger shared language and/or sketch to establish meaning).

What is the backpack’s personality (gesture/point)?

Is it optimistic (gesture and perhaps write/sketch to establish meaning) or pessimistic (gesture, write, and/or sketch)? What is the backpack’s personality (point to the word)? Optimistic (gesture/point) or pessimistic (gesture/point)?”

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Once you have established one or two basic facts about its personality, if you have more time, you can add more details to any of its previously-fixed traits, use the “tricks” above to recycle through the known facts, or simply move on to the final step and then the Scaffolded Oral Review - the “Big Reveal” of the artists’ work.

A Very Important Final Step At the end of the process, I urge you to leave about two minutes to ask, in English, why the character is feeling the way they are. For instance, if the class made a very, very sad shoe, then you would find out why the shoe is so sad.

Simply ask, with a tone of genuine curiosity and astonishment, “Why is this X so Y?” or, even better, “Why is this X so Y if it is so Z?” (For example, “Why is this hat so happy if it is small and poor?”) Make a note of the reason for the character’s emotion, perhaps at the bottom of the artwork in small, unobtrusive lettering, in case you will want to tell a story with the character later. This is a critical step in the character creation process and must not be overlooked if you intend on using the character in later stories. It is important to conduct this short discussion right at the end of the character-creation process, while the class’s emotional energy is still invested in the character. Again, you will want to speak in the stronger shared language (English for me) during this time, so that the students can tap into their creativity without the constraints that their very limited ability in the language would present.

You can also ask follow-up questions in the stronger shared language to deepen the character’s back story.

For instance, if the class said that their character, a hat, is happy, despite its poverty and diminutive size, because it is popular, you might ask why it is so popular. Or if they said it is happy because it is rich, you might ask where it makes its money. These details will serve you very well when creating stories using the characters, in Cycle Two (Narration) Phase Two (Imaginative Stories).

Review the Artist(s)’ Work Drumroll, please…TA-DA! This may be the first time that you have used class artists. If so, welcome to the Fun Zone! It is so engaging to most students and teachers to use the custom-made artwork for Scaffolded Oral Review and other activities.

Move to your Review Spot. Mine is beside the artist(s)’ easel, because when I was developing the daily instructional framework, the very first Scaffolded Oral Review strategy I used with regularity was this very one, which remains one of my favorites - revealing and discussing the drawing that the artist(s) created during the Guided Oral Input when we created the One Word Image.

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You will simply turn the artist(s)’ easel around, perhaps having the class applaud the artist(s) as you do so.

Applauding the artists is a good habit to get into, as it acknowledges their enormous contribution to the class’s learning, not to mention their engagement with the lessons in which there is artwork produced. Using the drawing as a visual aid, you will talk about it to the class, pointing out details and praising the artists’ talents and creativity as you explore their work.

Sometimes the artists are so creative that their drawing is slightly different - or even significantly different from what the class established as “true”. In this case, you can simply say in sort of a mock-astonished voice in the course language, as if you are getting some super-secret inside information, “Oh, the class said the hot dog was dark purple. In reality, it is light purple!”

As you point out parts of the artwork, you can talk about whatever strikes your fancy. Speak slowly and clearly. Students will be able to follow along with a natural, uninterrupted flow of language, but you still have to keep things slow. You may ask questions and have the class say choral responses, or you may narrate without interruption. If the class is engaged without questioning (as they often are, because students tend to be captivated by hearing their ideas narrated back to them with the visual support of the artists’ work), then there is no need for questioning, unless it feels natural and engaging to do so.

After reviewing the artwork, you will continue on to Shared Writing.

A Note on Displaying the Class’s Artwork The primary purpose for the artwork is to be used as a visual aid that supports you in recycling the entire story and the language used in it. This is so valuable. It allows your students to hear the language again in a new setting, with the added engagement that comes from finally seeing what the artists have been creating for them during the Guided Oral Input.

Once the artwork has been used for the pedagogical purpose of reviewing the language, it is time to put it to work in its second usage: as a source of classroom identity and pride in the class’s “art gallery.” This is an

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area of the wall where the classes each have a space for their artwork. At the top of each class’s space on the wall, I like to put a sign with the period name and the artists’ names.

These art galleries can create a lighthearted spirit of cross-class rivalry, as the classes try to outdo each other in fantastical character creation and the artists compare their work to the other artists in other classes. I staple or tack the newest artwork on top of the previous artwork, so that the latest and greatest creation is always on display.

Later in the year, in Cycle Two (Narration), Phase Two (Imaginative Stories), when you begin to create imaginative stories with your classes, you will have a collection of a few characters in each class’s gallery space. You can simply pull the picture off the wall and use it in the story-creating process, as described in a later instructional session.

To transition to the reveal of the artwork, you do not need to explain much, if anything. You can simply walk over to the easel and whisper to the artists to go have a seat, and then turn the easel around or arrange the artwork so that the class can see it.

You will want to move on, even if the artwork is not completely finished to the artist(s)’ satisfaction. If they are not done, send them back to their seats anyway. This sends the artists a very important message: that you will need them to work quickly and efficiently enough to have the artwork ready for Scaffolded Oral Review.

Since Guided Oral Input only lasts about 12 minutes (or, in a block period, about 20 minutes total, across two “doses” of Guided Oral Input), this is a tall order indeed. In fact, it is precicely because the artist(s)’ job is so critical that I recommend hiring students for a long-term engagement, and not just allowing whoever wants to volunteer that day to take on the super-important job of preparing this key visual aid in time for you to use it in Scaffolded Oral Review.

“Class, look (gesture) at the backpack! Clap (model clapping) for Kelvin and Michelle!”

Lead the class in applauding, and encourage them to clap more, even if they are already clapping enthusiastically. “Class, clap with ENTHUSIASM!” (“Enthusiasm” is a cognate in the course languages I teach. If it is not the case for you, then you might skip this step, or establish the meaning of the word “enthusiasm” in your course language by writing, sketching, and/or teaching a gesture.)

“Look (gesture) at the backpack. It is VERY BIG (point to details in the image that denote its size).”

“Is it blue, or red, or rainbow-colored?” (the class responds, chorally, “Rainbow!”)

“Yes, it is rainbow-colored. (pointing to the colors in the image as you say them) Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Is it happy (gesture or use body language to portray “happy”) or sad (gesture or use body language to portray “sad”)?” (the class responds, chorally, “Happy!”)

You can use the “Well, Almost” trick here, too. “No, class, it is NOT happy. It is VERY HAPPY (gesture or use body language to portray “very happy”).”

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Continue to discuss the details of the artwork, if time permits, before moving on to Shared Writing.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will set up a new Anchor Chart for this phase, Describing People Inside and Out. I recommend coming up with a more engaging, student-friendly title for the chart. In the example here, the title is “Realistic Characters.”

A good way to organize this chart is to draw the outline of a person, as shown here, to which you can add “internal” and “external” characteristics in each lesson. As with any anchor chart in Stepping Stones, the specific words or phrases on your chart will vary, depending on the actual details that your class discussed. Thus, your first period French One class might have an almost entirely-different set of specific words on their anchor chart, compared to your fifth period French One class. This is completely OK. In fact, it is more than just OK; it is, as discussed previously, how Stepping Stones is designed.

The Stepping Stones curricular framework is designed with learning objectives that are both structured (in this case, describing people’s and characters’ personality/internal traits and their external/physical characteristics) and also flexible and responsive to your students’ interests and any themes or topics that you want or need to cover.

The first day that you begin using a new chart, it is recommended to draw the chart in front of your students, beginning with a blank piece of chart paper (or a digital file) and adding to it bit by bit.

Building the anchor chart in this way, one element at a time, right there in class, as students watch and interact with you, is what makes these charts such a powerful teaching tool for literacy-focused teachers.

When our brains see “something” created from “nothing,” we remember the information much more easily than if we are handed a static, already-completed list of “Adjectives to Describe People.”

Basically, you will be making just such a list, and recording it on the chart, day by day, as you discuss more characters and people. But, unlike a list of vocabulary words, an anchor chart takes shape little by little, and the specific words that you will add each day will come from a meaningful context. This sets anchor charts apart from other kinds of resources like study guides and vocabulary lists: they emerge in the moment that they are needed and they contain terms that are embedded in a meaningful communicative context, as they come from the previous Guided Oral Input and Scaffolded Oral Review.

Today, you will create the new chart and add a few words or phrases that the class used to describe their One Word Image. See the images below for details on how this might go in your class.

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1. “Here is a person.”

(Draw the outline of a person.)

4. “…has emotions and feelings.”

(Draw a heart and - if these words are not cognates for you - write “emotions” or “feelings” in the course language and/or the

7. “He is angry.”

(Add to the anchor chart in the course language, and sketch or write in the stronger shared

10. “On the outside, is the backpack big or small?”

(Refer back to the artwork, if possible.)

2. “This person is a ‘character’.” 3. “A REALISTIC character…”

(Write “character” in the stronger (Write “realistic” in the course shared language .) language and in the stronger shared language if it is not an

5. “on the inside” (Write “inside” in the course language and in the stronger shared language, if it is not an obvious cognate.)

8. “A realistic person has their interior and…”

(Draw a line to separate the interior from the exterior.)

11. “Yes, it is big, and it is rainbow-colored.”

(Add the details and sketch/write to reinforce the meaning.)

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6. “How does the backpack feel on the inside? Is he happy?”

(Refer back to the artwork, if available.)

9. “…their exterior” (Write “outside” in the course language and in the stronger shared language, if it is not an

12. Move on to make a goal box and write one or two sentences (because time will be short on the day that you set up a new chart) in the course language for Shared Writing.

Make a “goal box” on the top of your With the addition of a new Anchor Chart today, you will most likely find that you only have time to write two or three sentences for Shared Writing. That is OK; you will continue to add to the chart and model writing to describe people’s internal and external traits throughout this phase.

Please see the first eight instructional sessions for more details on Write and Discuss in general. The specific lesson example given here models specifically how to use the new Anchor Chart.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Place a blank sheet of paper over, or to the side of, the anchor chart that you used in the previous phase. You might choose to leave the first anchor chart on display until the end of Cycle One (Description). This session is Cycle One Phase Three (Describing People Inside and Out), then you will teach some lessons from Cycle One Phase Four (Describing Past and Present), and then you will move to Cycle Two (Narration). So, because the previous chart was about description, and you are still working in Description, you might want to display both charts side by side. For those with limited wall space for each class, please see the Appendices for some ideas on how to manage all these charts.

On your paper, sketch a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language on your Shared Writing paper or digital file) is to describe the inside and outside of the backpack and use these words (write “internal” and “external” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: The Backpack Say: THE Backpack…or The Backpack of the Class?

Students: the class!

Write/Say: The Backpack of the Class…the class or the French class…or OUR French class?

Students: OUR French class!

Write/Say: The Backpack of Our French Class Write: Our backpack is Say: Our backpack is big or VERY big?

Students: VERY big!

Write/Say: Our backpack is VERY big, (say “comma” in the course language) Say: Our backpack is VERY big…on the outside (point to the words on the anchor chart or goal box) or on the inside (point)?

Students: Outside!

Write/Say: Our backpack is VERY big, (say “comma” in the course language) on the outside.

YAY! (Give the class a check mark in the goal box.)

Write/Say: It is the color Say: What is its color?

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Students: Rainbow!

Write/Say: Our backpack is VERY big, (say “comma” in the course language) on the outside. It is the color of the rainbow.

Reading/Recycling: The Backpack of Our French Class: Our backpack is VERY big, (say “comma” in the course language) on the outside. It is the color of the rainbow.

Write/Say: On the Say: On the outside, or on the inside?

Students call out varying responses: Inside! Angry! On the inside!

Write/Say: On the INSIDE — YAY! (Give the class a check mark in the goal box.)

Reading/Recycling: Our backpack is VERY big, (say “comma” in the course language) on the outside. It is the color of the rainbow. On the inside…

Say: On the inside, the backpack is…

Students call out varying responses: Angry! NOT HAPPY! Very angry!

Write/Say: On the inside, the backpack is not happy. It feels…

Say: The backpack feels happy?

Students call out varying responses: No! Angry! NOT HAPPY! Very angry!

Write/Say: On the inside, the backpack is not happy. It feels angry. Very angry.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to describe the character comes up naturally as you write, you can add it to the anchor chart. You will add a few new words or phrases to the class’s anchor chart in each lesson that you work with it.

Each class will have slightly different details on their chart. This is OK; the Stepping Stones framework is designed to be flexible in the specific language. The overall learning goal is to “describe people inside and out” NOT to learn specific words.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

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Write Inside the Story Write Inside the Story is explained in more detail in Session Nine.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more details in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might model with a sentence as shown in this image.)

Give students time to work on in their writing, perhaps working with a partner, if you think that will be helpful to them. At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 12

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to describe the heroes that people in class submitted, using words to describe their internal AND external traits Intermediate: say sentences in French to describe people’s heroes, using words to describe their internal AND external traits Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to describe people’s heroes, using words to describe their internal AND external traits, and using transition words to say more

Preparation You will want to have students prepare their “baby pictures” for the next session, Baby Picture Talk, and submit them to the class slideshow or other discussion tool. Please see Session 13 for more information.

The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a variation on Slide Talk called Heroes Picture Talk.

You can use the slideshow from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) as I used to make the demonstration lesson, or you can quite easily also make your own. You will need to have students complete their slide prior to beginning the Guided Oral Input for this session, perhaps as homework or at the end of class in a lesson prior to this one.

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, or at the latest before you move into Session 16, the first session in the Narration cycle (Cycle Two). See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. First, distribute or project the text. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

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Write Inside the Story This strategy is explained in more detail in Session 9, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy. In this sample lesson, I use a beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Three, shown below, in French. The texts for this phase are “Personal Profiles” about contemporary people who have made an important contribution to the world.

French Beginner Text - Personal Profile

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language.

ion Resources

French Extens

- Video

French Extension Resou

rces - Website

Write Inside the Story is a strategy that helps students practice and

“play with” the new language on the

Anchor Chart that you introduced so far in this phase. This strategy is an effective way to review/reinforce previous learning. You will ask students to copy sentences from the Reading Workshop text and add sentences or phrases, using terms from the anchor chart (words to describe people’s external and internal characteristics) to “improve” the text.

“I will read this personal profile to you in French, about Stromae, a musical artist who performs in French.” (read in the course language) “Let’s read the text again and look for a part that could have more facts about Stromae as a person, and then “write inside” the sentence. You will copy it and then we will use the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more details about Stromae, inside and out.”

(Model with a sentence or two, as shown here, and then perhaps - especially for upper-level classes, ask students to choose another sentence and, working independently or with a partner, add details to that sentence in their own work.)

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Reading Workshop only lasts about six to eight minutes (slightly longer in a block schedule), so after a few minutes of work time, you might have volunteers share out to the whole group, or read their sentences to a partner, and then move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then the Heroes Picture Talk.

Quick Calendar Check-In It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Move on to the Slide Talk - Heroes Picture Talk. Display the slideshow where students have submitted pictures (and perhaps a short description in the stronger shared language or - especially for upper levels - the course language - of their heroes.

“Class, look (gesture) at this person (place your hand under a picture that a student submitted).”

Is this person athletic (teach students a gesture for this term, and/or write it in the course language and the stronger shared language if it is not a very obvious cognate, and/or make a quick sketch to establish meaning)?” (students may call out, “Yes!” or “Athletic!”)

“Yes, this person is athletic. Her name is Wanda Butts. (pointing to the letters on the slideshow and perhaps spelling in the course language) Capital W-A-N-D-A-space-capital B-U-T-T-S. “Is Ms. Butts wearing a swimsuit (gesture to the image or sketch/write to establish meaning) or a ski hat (gesture, sketch, write, or use an actual hat/realia to establish meaning)?” (students may call out, “Swimsuit!” or “No!”)

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“Yes, she is wearing a swimsuit. Look (gesture) and think (gesture). Think (gesture) about Ms. Butts. She is athletic. She is wearing a swimsuit. Is she a happy (use your body language, facial expression, and tone of voice to convey “happy”) person? Is she optimistic (or any other term that you are pretty sure students will remember from previous lessons)? Or is she a sad person? Is she a pessimist?” (students may call out, “Happy!” or “Optimistic!” or “No!”) Continue in a similar manner, working your way through several slides, time permitting. You will not get to all of the students’ images; that is OK. You might “park” on this session for another lesson or two, in order to discuss more slides. Or you can simply move on. If you want to, you might use the students’ information to create personalized resources, such as a class text with all the pictures. You can create the text by downloading the slides as a PDF. Before you do this, you might want to format the slides and edit the information that students submitted, and/or translate the information they submitted in their stronger language(s), to make a simple reading that you might use in future lessons’ Reading Workshop, or put in your classroom library for an option when you begin Free-Choice Reading later in the year.

Select “Export as PDF.”

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Quick Quiz Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of this strategy, see Session 1.

“Time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, Ms. Wanda Butts …. shhhhh…is athletic and optimistic….shhhh….or Ms. Wanda Butts is…..shhhhh….timid and pessimistic…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! Ms.

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Wanda Butts …. shhhhh…. is athletic and optimistic…shhhh…or Ms. Wanda Butts is….shhhh….timid and pessimistic?

(The class calls out, “athletic and optimistic! or “Athletic!” or “Optimistic!”)

“Yes, class! Ms. Wanda Butts is athletic and optimistic.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) Dr. Massimo Galli …. shhhhh…is pessimistic and timid….shhhh….or Dr. Massimo Galli is…..shhhhh….optimistic and hard-working…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! Dr. Massimo Galli …. shhhhh…. is pessimistic and timid…shhhh…or Dr. Massimo Galli is….shhhh….optimistic and hard-working?

(The class calls out, “Optimistic and hard-working!” or “Optimistic!” or “Hard-working!”)

“Yes, class! Dr. Massimo Galli is optimistic and hard-working.”

Ask more questions, if time permits.

A “Goal Box

”

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue working with the anchor chart that you set up in the previous lessons. As you use the chart in this lesson, you will add two to four terms to the growing list of language that can be used to execute the language function that undergirds this phase: describing people inside and out. You might want to make a “goal box” on the top of your Shared Writing text and write one or two terms from the chart in the box (either the new terms, as pictured in the example, or terms that you wrote on the chart in a previous lesson (to reinforce them). During Write and Discuss, you can then “challenge” the class to use the “goal words” in the class’s writing, as modeled below.

The actual contents of Write and Discuss will, of course, depend upon your class’s discussion from the lesson. Furthermore, the actual contents of your Anchor Chart and Goal Box may well vary from the example, depending on what fit your lesson and goals. Within the “writing goal” of “describing people inside and out” (i.e. using adjectives to describe internal and external characteristics), there are, of course, many possible words or phrases that might be used.

As you are still getting your sea legs (or is that your “CI Legs”?) under you, especially in regards to using anchor charts during Shared Writing, you will likely continue to find that you only have time to write two or three sentences. That is OK; you are still building the foundation, and you are learning to use a very powerful literacy tool: the Anchor Chart.

Please see the first eight instructional sessions for more details on Write and Discuss in general.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language.

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Note: Some teachers like to make pre-printed Shared Writing sheets that already have the goal box and clip art of a basketball, soccer, or other goal.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language on your Shared Writing paper or digital file) is to describe people inside and out (point to the words on the chart) and today our goal is to use these words (write “athlétique” and “travailleur.euse” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: The Heroes that we Say: The heroes that we like (gesture) or the heroes that we love (gesture) or the heroes that we admire (gesture)… ”admire” (gesture) means “admire.” Show me “admire” (gesture). Show me “likes” (gesture). “Loves” (gesture). “Prefers” (gesture). “Admire” (gesture).”

“The heroes that we like (gesture) or the heroes that we love (gesture) or the heroes that we admire (gesture)?”

Students: Admire! or The heroes that we admire!

Giving students a brand-new option like this during Write and Discuss is very gratifying, for both teachers and also for students, as explained in more detail in the note below.

Note: Students, when given a brand-new, novel, more interesting, and possibly more-complex option, generally choose the new, more complex option. After observing this phenomenon in many classes over the years, with students from all kinds of language backgrounds, at all levels, even beginners, I can only surmise that it is actually human nature to choose a challenge. I assume that it makes students feel smart.

This is truly child development expert Lev Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development” in action. The “Zone of Proximal Development” refers to the “zone” of learners’ performance that is just above the level of what they could do on their own. On their own, students would, in all likelihood, not know the word “admire” and thus they would not be able to choose that word. However, you are leading the Shared Writing and assisting students to work slightly above their independent level, within the Zone of Proximal Development, in effect “stretching” them to the next level, before they are capable of performing at that level on their own.

This is excellent teaching, and it has the added benefit of restoring your faith in humanity, as it is extremely encouraging to see your students choosing a challenge. It helps you to see them for who they really are — eager, curious learners who want to grow and develop. Even the most sluggish class of utter lazybonses will generally, and enthusiastically, call for the new, more challenging terms when you have set them up for that Page 266

feeling of success that comes from working in the Zone of Proximal Development with a skilled instructional leader (that’s YOU!).

Say: Heroes we admire…(writing and spelling in French) A-D-M-I-R-E. Write and spell in French: Ms. Capital W-A-N-D-A-spaceCapital B-U-T-T-S is a person Say: Ms. Wanda Butts is an athletic person? Is she a hard-working person? Is she an optimistic person, or a pessimistic person? What is her personality? What’s she like on the inside?”

Students: Optimistic! or Athletic! or Hard-working!

Write: a hard-working person Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Say: Is Ms. Wanda Butts a hard-working person AND an athletic person?

Students: Yes! or Athletic! or Hard-working and athletic person!

Write: and an athletic person.

Reading/Recycling: The heroes that we admire. Ms. Wanda Butts is a hard-working person and an athletic person. Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box.)

Write and spell in French: Dr. Massimo Galli Capital M-A-S-S-I-M-O-space-Capital G-A-L-L-I is a person Say: Dr. Massimo Galli is a timid person? Is he a hard-working person? Is he an optimistic person, or a pessimistic person? What is his personality? What’s he like on the inside?”

Students: Optimistic! or NOT timid! or Hard-working!

Write: Dr. Massimo Galli is a hard-working person Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box.)

Say: Dr. Massimo Galli is a hard-working person…or Dr. Massimo Galli is a hard-working person ALSO? Students: ALSO! or Hard-working person also!

Write: also Reading/Recycling: The heroes that we admire. Ms. Wanda Butts is a hard-working person and an athletic person. Dr. Massimo Galli is a hard-working person also.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to describe a person comes up naturally as you write, you can add it to the Anchor Chart.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Write Inside the Story Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. You can have them work in a notebook or folder, in their portfolios, or on a piece of paper that they can turn in on the way out the door after class. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

Write Inside the Story is a strategy that helps students practice and “play with” the new language on the Anchor Chart, and (in later lessons when you have accumulated a list of more terms on the Anchor Chart) to review/reinforce the previous language. You will ask students to copy the Shared Writing text (if they have not already done so during Shared Writing) and add to the class’s writing, using terms from the anchor chart to “improve” the text.

“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more facts in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might model with a sentence as shown above.)

Give students time to work on on their writing, perhaps working with a partner, if you think that will be helpful to them. As noted in previous sessions, you might notice as students work that are re-engaging with the written language by referring to the text and/or chart(s).

By re-organizing and re-using the language, and using it to create new original phrases and sentences, students are (1) processing the language input again, in a deeper way and (2) reinforcing and practicing the literacy move that you are modeling by using the anchor chart during Write and Discuss. This builds crosscurricular literacy and, perhaps most importantly, helps students to develop a more confident self-concept as a learner: someone who can learn new “tricks” or strategies and then use tools (such as a “mentor text” in the form of the class’s Shared Writing text or tools like anchor charts) to deploy those “moves.” This is a very valuable experience for students, and especially for those students for whom literacy in their content-area classes (e.g. English Language Arts or Economics) is challenging.

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Many students who are not reading on grade level have, by the time they arrive in a secondary classroom, spent years of their educational careers attempting to decode and comprehend texts that are far above their independent reading level. My years working with Reading Intervention students in middle school showed me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how little confidence students can have when their confident reading level is languishing two, three, or even four or more grade levels behind their chronological age and grade.

For these students, it can be an especially valuable experience to “start over” on their literacy journey and get a “clean slate” or a “fresh start” with an entire class of peers who are also beginners in the new language. It may well be the only time in their entire educational careers that they were in an entire class that was focused on the foundations of reading, together. This is because, by fifth grade and above, most students whose reading level lags behind their age or grade find themselves feeling left out, confused, and - honestly - like a major loser when the class seems to be confidently and easily reading a passage that they cannot hope to tackle on their own.

The feeling of being “one of the crowd” in a beginner language course can be incredibly freeing to such students. They have told me so! Once, a student, whose reading level was actually not behind his grade level, and who did not appear to be experiencing any academic difficulties, told me, with great enthusiasm and wonder, “Ms. Hargaden, this class is the only one where I understand EVERYTHING! And you’re talking in SPANISH!” The amazing thing I realized was that this student did not demonstrate any “warning signs” or “red flags” to indicate that they might be feeling lost in six out of seven periods of the school day. But they are, in fact, feeling lost. My students have shown me over the years that they deeply appreciate how comprehensible they are finding the lessons in Spanish, and that they feel strongly supported by the instructional approach in Spanish class.

It’s such important work that we are doing, and it has far-reaching ramifications for students’ general level of academic confidence and ability, far beyond the scope of acquiring Spanish or Hebrew or French or Mandarin. This is education of the whole person, and it’s just really great teaching!

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 13

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to describe the pictures that people in class submitted, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present Intermediate: say sentences in French to describe the pictures that people in class submitted, giving details to compare descriptions of people’s internal AND external traits in the past and present Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to describe the pictures that people in class submitted, giving details to compare descriptions of people’s internal AND external traits in the past and present, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a variation on Slide Talk called Baby Picture Talk.

You can use the slideshow from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) or make your own. You will need to have students complete their slide prior to beginning the Guided Oral Input for this session, perhaps as homework or at the end of class in a lesson prior to this one.

As an alternative, or in addition to, using students’ baby pictures, you can round up baby pictures of school staff, or from the larger culture who are well-known to the majority of your students. You can include pictures of the people when they grew older. It is fun to have students guess who is who and then show the baby pictures side-by-side with the recent pictures and compare/contrast. You can also simply use Google Image Search to find baby pictures. “Funny babies” usually results in some really amusing images. Look!

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Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, or at the latest before you move into Session 16, the first session in the Narration cycle (Cycle Two). See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. First, distribute or project the text. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Find That Cognate In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four, shown here, in French. The texts for this phase are infographics about important contemporary issues, with a particular focus on Anti-racism and Black history.

The lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text, and then proceed.Since the Reading Workshop texts “pivot” to a new text type (i.e. in Cycle One Phase Three, we provide “Personal Profiles” and in this phase, we provide infographics), we are returning to a familiar instructional strategy to allow students some time to “settle in” to this phase and text type, if you are choosing to use our resources. Because this strategy has been explained in detail in Session One, we will move on to the lesson procedures right away in this session.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language. Because the example is an infographic, it bears mentioning that you will probably not “read” it through as you would a less graphic-oriented text. You will most likely “walk through” the infographics, reading the words and phrases and then discussing them, describing some of the pictures/graphics, etc.

French beginner examples

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“I will read this infographic to you in French and talk about some of the images, in French. This infographic will teach you about terms that are important when discussing racism. There are a lot of cognates in this infographic, and after we read it, we will find some of them, so be on the lookout as we read it.” (read and discuss in the course language) (Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘exclusion’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, exclusion in English, is exclusion. E-X-C-L-U-S-I-O-N.” (This sounds like: “Oui, exclusion en anglais est eclusion. uhhh-eeks-saay-ell (saying letters in French).”)

(Because these words might not be familiar to your students in English, or their stronger language(s), you may need to establish meaning of the ENGLISH. You can ask students to turn and tell a partner the word’s meaning, in English, and circulate to listen in and assess the general level of understanding of these terms, and, if needed, teach them by briefly sketching and/or giving some examples. This is modeled below.)

French beginner examp

le

“Class, turn and tell a partner what “exclusion” means. Go!” (students talk as you listen in to assess their understanding of the cognate) (if you have determined that they need extra reinforcement of the term in the stronger shared language) “Class, look (gesture). Exclusion. (spelling in French) E-X-C-L-U-S-I-O-N. One person. Two people. Three, four, five people. A group. Another person. The group excludes the person. They don’t talk to the person.

They don’t look at the person. They EXCLUDE the person. Class, look (gesture) and think (gesture). The group is excluding this person. Is this excluded person happy (gesture) or sad (gesture)?”

(Moving on to another cognate,) “Class, ‘segregation' in English? Yes, segregation in English, is segregation. S-E-G-R-E-G-A-T-I-O-N.” “Class, turn and tell a partner what “segregation” means. Go!” (Listen in to this brief turn and talk, and if students seem to need further clarification, teach that word as well, perhaps using a similar process to the one depicted above.)

(Asking a more open-ended question, if time permits:) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, racism in English, is racism. R-A-C-I-S-M.” Page 272

E-X-C-L-U-S-I-O-N

One person, two people, three people, four people. A group.

Another person

The group EXCLUDES the other person.

The group does not talk to the person.

The group does not look at the person.

The group EXCLUDES the other person.

Look at this person.

Think about the person.

Think...is this person happy?

After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, beginning with the calendar check-in and then the Baby Picture Talk.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Display the slideshow, and move on to the Baby Picture Talk, showing one of the slides that you or the students prepared.

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“Class, look (gesture) at baby Sophie! AWWWWWWW! Sophie was so LITTLE (gesture)!!

When Sophie was a baby (point to the picture), when she was little (gesture), she LOVED (gesture) Barney.”

“Sophie…”

(When you ask one student a question, or address them directly, you are advised to make sure that the student is not on the spot by using the trick outlined below.)

Speak to the student in the course language… but don’t QUITE finish the utterance…

Ask the class in the stronger shared language, “What am I asking/saying?””

The class will usually call out in the stronger shared language what you said to the student.

Now that the student knows what you are asking, beyond any doubt, repeat the utterance in the course language.

“Sophie, look (gesture) at the class — what am I telling Sophie?” (the class yells, “Look at the class!” or “Look!”)

“Sophie, look (gesture) at the class.”

“Who in the class (gesture) loved (gesture) Barney when they were little? One, two (counting in the course language)…Sophie, look (gesture)! Eight people LOVED Barney when they were little! Who in the class (gesture) did NOT like (gesture) Barney when they were little? One, two (counting)…Sophie, look, 23 people did NOT like (gesture) Barney when they were little.”

“What did I just say to Sophie?” (students call out, “23 people did not like Barney!”)

“Yes, Sophie, 23 people did NOT (gesture) like Barney when they were little! Class, look (gesture) at Sophie.

Think (gesture) about Sophie. Is Sophie sad (gesture) because 23 people in the class do NOT like (gesture) Barney? Look (gesture) at Sophie, and think (gesture) … you think (gesture) that Sophie is sad (gesture)?” (students call out “NO!”) Page 274

“You think (gesture) that Sophie is NOT sad (gesture)? Sophie, are you sad (gesture)? What did I ask?” (students call out, “Are you sad!”)

“Sophie, are you sad (gesture) because 23 people do not like (gesture) Barney?”

Continue on in this fashion, covering as few or as many slides as feels natural and engaging in the eight to 20 minutes that you have scheduled for the Guided Oral Input. You can return to the slides in the next lesson, which is what is “scheduled” on the sample phase outline, which has three lessons scheduled to discuss your students’ slides or other variations on Baby Picture Talk — see the “Preparation” notes at the beginning of this session for other options.

Refer back to Session 12 for suggestions on making a class book out of the slideshow.

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. You will probably want to plan on spending at least one more class period on this strategy, and discuss more slides then.

Quick Quiz Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of this strategy, see Session One. “Time for a review quiz. Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, when Sophie was little …. shhhhh…she loved Barney….shhhh….or Sophie loves Barney…..shhhhh….NOW…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! when Sophie was little …. shhhhh…. she loved Barney…shhhh…oor Sophie loves Barney….shhhh….NOW? (The class calls out, “Little! or “When she was little! ”etc.)

“Yes, class! When Sophie was little, she loved Barney.”

“Number Two. (two fingers) Now Sophie is age …. shhhhh…16….shhhh….and NOW Sophie loves Barney…..shhhhh….or Sophie hates Barney now…shhhhhhhh? Shhhhh! Now Sophie is age …. shhhhh…

16….shhhh….and NOW Sophie loves Barney…..shhhhh….or Sophie hates Barney now?

(The class calls out, “Hates! or “Hares Barney now! ”etc.)

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“Yes, class! When Sophie was little, she loved Barney. But now she is 16 and she hates Barney.”

Ask more questions, if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will set up a new anchor chart for this phase to collect a list of terms that are useful for describing people and places in the past and present. See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today:

First, draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language. Some teachers like to make pre-printed Shared Writing sheets that already have the goal box and clip art of a basketball, soccer, or other goal.

A “Goal Box”

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language) is to describe in the past (point to the word “past” on the chart) and present (point to the word “past” on the chart). Today our goal is to use these words (write “au passé” and “au présent” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: Barney the Dinosaur that Say: Barney the dinosaur that we LIKED (gesture) or Barney the dinosaur that we LOVED (gesture)…

Students: Liked! or Loved! or The dinosaur we loved! or Hate!

Say: the dinosaur that we liked (gesture) in the past (writing and spelling in French) A-U-espace-P-A-S-S-E-accent aigu. Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

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Write and spell: Sophie…S-O-P-H-I-E… Say: Sophie LIKED (gesture) Barney or Sophie LOVED (gesture)

Students: Loved! or Loved Barney! or Sophie loved Barney!

Write: …loved Barney.

Read/Recycle: Barney, the dinosaur that we loved in the past.

Sophie loved Barney.

Say: Sophie LOVED Barney IN THE PAST (point to the word “past” on the chart) or Sophie loves Barney NOW (point to the word “present/now” on the chart)?

Students: In the past! or Loved Barney in the past! etc.

Write/Say: In the past …(writing and spelling in French) A-U-espace-P-A-S-S-E-accent aigu. Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Say: In the past, Sophie loved Barney a little (gesture) or a lot (gesture)?

Students: A lot!

Say: Sophie, in the past, you loved Barney a little (gesture) or a lot (gesture)…what am I asking Sophie?

Students: Did you love Barney a little or a lot!

Say: Sophie, in the past, did you love Barney a little (gesture) or a lot (gesture)?

Sophie: a lot?

Write/Say: In the past, Sophie loved Barney a lot.

Reading/Recycling: Barney, the dinosaur we loved in the past. In the past, Sophie loved Barney a lot.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to describe in the present and past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Written Quick Quiz Note: For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please see Session 5 in which it was first introduced.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Please note that, even for a written quiz, it is highly recommended that you still use gestures, facial expressions, or even walk to the board or Shared Writing text, to point out visuals that might make the questions more comprehensible.

You might find that, since you have used the strategy of a Quick Quiz several times in past lessons, and since you are using positioning (moving to your quiz spot) to signal to students that you have moved on to a familiar, predictable part of the daily instructional framework, Student Application and Assessment, which happens every day at the end of class, that you do not need to use English to transition and explain the next activity.

One of the great advantages of using a daily instructional framework is that you will be able to use less and less English to transition, since the structure of class is similar each day. Students should come to expect certain directions, after you have done them several times. So, you are encouraged to begin experimenting with giving more directions in the course language. One way to do that is to give the directions first in English, and then in the course language, repeating them so that students are able to understand them in the course language, so that you can gradually use less English and eventually transition to giving directions fully in the course language. This is modeled below. Note that the directions are given in English, but you would be speaking in your course language.

“Quiz time. You will need paper and pencil. You will hear the question TWO TIMES. Listen SILENTLY and write a word, a phrase, or a sentence in French to answer. Spelling does NOT count; you will get an A if you can show the correct answer, in French, with any kind of spelling that you think is best, as long as it shows that you know the answer.”

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“We will take a quiz.”

“You need paper and a pencil or pen.”

“I will repeat the question.

Listen in silence.”

“You will hear a question.

Listen in silence.”

“Write the answer on your paper.”

(re-explaining in the course language and sketching to reinforce comprehension) Number One. (hold up one finger) Class, in the past did Sophie LOVE (gesture) Barney…. shhhhh…. or did Sophie HATE (gesture) Barney in the past? Shh…in the past, did Sophie LOVE (gesture) Barney or did Sophie HATE (gesture) Barney in the past…. shhhhh….?”

“Number Two. (hold up two fingers) now does Sophie LOVE (gesture) Barney or does Sophie NOT LOVE (gesture) Barney now…. shhhhh…. now does Sophie LOVE (gesture) Barney or does Sophie NOT LOVE (gesture) Barney now….shhhh?”

Continue in this manner, perhaps asking three to five total questions, making sure to leave about five minutes at the end of class to grade them. For more details on suggested ways to use the in-class grading as a learning opportunity (as students listen to you restate the questions and check their answers, or a partner’s answers), please see Session 5.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 14

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present Intermediate: say sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present, giving details to compare descriptions of internal AND external traits in the past and present Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present, giving details to compare descriptions of people’s internal AND external traits in the past and present, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Class Survey. This versatile strategy was first introduced in Session Seven. See that session for a more detailed explanation of the strategy.

As explained in more detail in Session Seven, you can choose to use picture prompts, such as the ones in the example lesson, which you can download from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or you can simply make a chart on the board or overhead projector to record students’ responses to the survey questions. You can choose any topic about which to survey your class, as long as the question elicits descriptions in the past and present. For example: Music you liked when you were 10 and music you like now, or school subjects/ activities you liked in elementary school versus what you like now. The example from our TpT store is about the topic of activities in kindergarten.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, or at the latest before you move into Session 16, the first session in the Narration cycle (Cycle Two). See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

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Show Me Your (Writing) Moves In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four, shown here, in French.

The texts for this phase are infographics. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the French Beginner Infogra

most comprehensible.

phic

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text, and then proceed.

We will use the “Show Me Your (Writing) Moves” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today. This strategy was first introduced in Session Nine, in which you can find a more detailed explanation.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this infographic to you in French, about legal protections against discrimination. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write sentences about the text.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, if you have set that job up, which I strongly suggest you do this week, if you still have not done so.) (read the text in the course language and discuss the graphic elements, if using an infographic.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “In the past (pointing to the anchor chart) the law…Did the law protect against race discrimination?”

Students: No? (Speaking and writing in the course language) “the law did not protect against racial discrimination.”

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “Now (pointing to the anchor chart) the law…Does the law protect against race discrimination?”

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(Speaking and writing in the course language) “now, the law protects against race discrimination.”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the class survey.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Because you will be using the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy “Who Said What?” you will need to record some specific students’ names, so that you can more easily refer back to those specific people during Scaffolded Oral Review. This is modeled below.

Display the slideshow, and briefly introduce the Class Survey.

“This is a survey about what you were like in kindergarten.”

“Class, look (gesture) at the kindergarten kids (point to the image). Think (gesture) about kindergarten (gesture).”

“In kindergarten (place your hand under the word/image on the slide), did you like (gesture) mud (slide or place your hand under the image of “mud” or sketch/write, or use realia or another way to establish meaning)? Who in the class (gesture) liked (gesture) mud (point) in kindergarten (point)?” (counting students’ raised hands) “One, two, three…eleven people liked (gesture) mud (point) in kindergarten (point).”

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“Who in the class (gesture) LOVED (gesture) mud (point) in kindergarten (point)? (counting students’ raised hands) “One, two…two people LOVED (gesture) mud (point) in kindergarten (point). Dré LOVED mud in kindergarten (writing and spelling in the course language) D-R-E-accent aigu.

MaKayla LOVED mud in kindergarten (writing and spelling in the course language) Capital M-A-Capital K-A-Y-L-A.” “Who likes (gesture) mud (point) now (point to the words on the slide or table you drew to collect responses)?” (counting students’ raised hands) “One, two…two people like (gesture) mud (point) now (point). MaKayla LOVED mud in kindergarten and she likes (gesture) mud (point) now (point).

MaKayla (writing and spelling in the course language) Capital M-ACapital K-A-Y-L-A. Dré LOVED mud in kindergarten but he does not like (gesture) mud (point) now (point). Sacha did NOT LIKE (gesture) mud (point) in kindergarten (point) but he likes (gesture) mud (point) now (point) (writing and spelling in the course language) S-A-C-H-A.” Continue with other slides, activities, and words to describe people, as time permits.

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

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Who Said What?

Move to your Review Spot. This Scaffolded Oral Review strategy is a good way to lay the foundation for having characters think and speak, which will be a major focus of the anchor charts and literacy work in Cycle Two, Narration, which is the next phase. You are currently in the last phase of Cycle One, Description, Phase Four, Describing in the Past and Present. This strategy asks students to imagine what someone would say or think in reaction to various situations that are related to the facts you discussed during Guided Oral Input.

You will make a series of three to five statements that a member of the class may have said, based on what you learned in the survey, and ask who said, or would have said, each one.

You will say something that one of the students could have said, and ask the class, “Who said that?”, “Who would say that?”, or “Who would have said that?”

Once the class has correctly identified who would have said what, you can provide more repetitions of the language by restating the person and what they said, for example, “Sacha would have said, I don’t like mud!’”

You can choose to extend the learning by continuing the sentence with the words from your anchor chart, for example, “In the past, Sacha would have said, I don’t like mud!” For more advanced students, you can also choose to ask the class to explain why the person said, or would have said, that statement, for example, “Sacha would have said, ‘I don’t like mud!’ Why would he say that?”

“Time for a review quiz. This is called “Who Said What?” I will pretend to be someone in class, and say something. Your job is to say who might say that. You will hear the answer twice. The first time, listen, don’t talk. The second time, say the person who would have said this.” (explaining the directions again in the course language) “I will say (gesture)…Say (gesture) means say. Show me “say” (gesture). Show me “look” (gesture). “Prefer” (gesture). “Love” (gesture). “Talk” (gesture). “Like” (gesture). “Say” (gesture).”

“I will say (gesture) a sentence in French.”

“I will say (gesture) the sentence two (hold up two fingers) times. The first time (hold up one finger) listen (gesture). Do not talk (gesture).”

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“The second time (hold up two fingers), you will say (gesture) who in class would have said (gesture) that.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger). Who would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) mud (point to the image/ word)!’…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) mud (point to the image/word)!’?”

Students call out: MaKayla! Dré! etc.

“Yes, MaKayla would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) mud (point to the image/word)!’ Dré woukd have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) mud (point)?”

“Would Dré say (gesture) NOW (point to the image/word) ‘I love (gesture) mud (point)’….shhhh…or ‘I DON’T LIKE (gesture) mud’? Would Dré say (gesture) NOW (point to the image/word) ‘I love mud’?”

“Number Two. (hold up two fingers). Who would have said (gesture) in kindergarten (point to the image/word) ‘I am curious (point)!’…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) in kindergarten (point to the image/word) ‘I am curious (point)’?”

Students call out the answer, and you might ask follow-up questions as modeled above.

Ask more questions, if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 13, adding two or three new terms to it today.

Even if you used more than two or three new terms during Guided Oral Input and Scaffolded Oral Review, you are advised to limit the number of new terms that you add to your anchor chart in any given lesson. This may mean that you need to be selective, and think about what terms are the most generally useful to execute the language function on this anchor chart (specifically, describing in the past and present), and focus on those terms, adding them to the chart. You might also add completely new terms to the chart, and establish their meaning through a sketch, translation, and/or teaching a new gesture.

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today:

Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language.

A “Goal Box”

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Note: Some teachers like to make pre-printed Shared Writing sheets that already have the goal box and clip art of a basketball, soccer, or other goal.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language) is to describe in the past (point to the word “past” on the chart) and present (point to the word “past” on the chart). Today our goal is to use these words (write “aimait/aimais” and “aime” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: The Mud Say: The Mud I LIKED (gesture) or The Mud I LOVED (gesture)…

Students: Liked! or Loved! or The mud I loved! etc.

Say: the mud that I loved…(writing and spelling in French) A-D-O-R-A-I-S. Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Write and spell: The Story of MaKayla…

Capital M-A-Capital K-A-Y-L-A…

Say and write: I am MaKayla. I’m…

Say: I am 15…or when I WAS in kindergarten?

Students: 15! Kindergarten! When I was in kindergarten! etc.

Write: …when I was…five (hold up five fingers)? fifteen (jot “15”)? ten (jot “10”)?

Students: 5! When I was 5! etc.

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Crossing out “I am” and replacing it with “I was”, say and write: When I was 5, I loved (gesture)

Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Read/Recycle: The Mud That I Loved: The Story of MaKayla. I am MaKayla. When I was five, I loved Say: MaKayla LOVED (gesture) the mud when she was 5, or MaKayla liked (gesture) the mud when she was 5?

Students: Loved! Loved the mud! etc.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to describe in the present and past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. Then, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Write Inside the Story Write Inside the Story is explained in more detail in Session Nine.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

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“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more details in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might explain the activity in English and then repeat in the course language, as shown below.

“We will write inside the text.”

“We will use the chart.”

“We will add to the text.”

(You might model with a sentence or two, as shown here.)

Give students time to work on their writing, perhaps working with a partner, if you think that will be helpful to them.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 15

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to describe technology now and in the past, giving details to compare Intermediate: say sentences in French to describe to describe technology now and in the past, giving details to compare Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to to describe technology now and in the past, using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Visual Survey. This versatile strategy was first introduced in Session Six, where you can read a more detailed explanation of the strategy.

As explained in Session Six, a Visual Survey is basically a series of images about a topic, which you will describe/discuss, and then a “voting slide” which shows all four of the images so that students can vote on their favorite. The example in this lesson is from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) but you can make your own quite easily, about any topic that fits with the language focus of “describing in the past and present.”

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, because the next session, Session 16, is the first session in the Narration cycle (Cycle Two), and you will want to have the Videographer trained to record Video Retells. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information.

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You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Write Inside the Story This strategy is explained in more detail in Session Nine, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy, and in Session 12, where it was first used for Reading Workshop.

In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four. The texts for this phase are infographics. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson.

French Beginner Infogra

phic

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this infographic to you in French, about technology use in France. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write more details in the text.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, and then read the text in the course language and discuss the graphic elements, if using an infographic.)

“In the past (pointing to the anchor chart)…who had a phone when they were 5?”

(Students raise hands or call out.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “Who had an iPad when they were 5?”

(Students raise hands or call out.)

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(Speaking and writing in the course language) “Who loved their iPad?” (Students raise hands or call out.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “Terrell (pointing to the anchor chart) loved his iPad in the past.”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the class survey.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Display the slideshow, and briefly introduce the Class Survey.

“This is a survey about technology now and in the past.”

“Class, look (gesture) at the phone (point to the image). Think (gesture) about the phone (gesture). Is it modern (write the word in the course language and, if it is not an obvious cognate, in the class’s stronger shared language, also, to establish the meaning of the term)?” (students call out: No! etc.)

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“Yes, class, this phone is NOT modern (place your hand under the word). Who in the class (gesture) has a modern phone? (counting students’ raised hands) One, two, three…28 people have a modern (point) phone.”

“Who in the class (gesture) has talked (gesture) on a phone like this (place your hand on the image)? (counting students’ raised hands) One, two…two people have talked (gesture) on a phone like this (point).”

“Class, think (gesture). Is a modern phone smaller (gesture) or bigger (gesture) than this phone (point)?”

(Note: You may not have used the construction “smaller than” previously in class. Because your goal is for students to comprehend the overall message, and not the individual parts of the language, there is probably no need to worry about the fact that your students have not yet encountered that language structure. You will rely on meaning and context to convey the comparison you are making between old phones like the one pictured, and “modern” phones.) (students call out: Big! Bigger! etc.)

“Yes, this phone (point) is bigger (gesture) than a modern (point to the word) phone. A modern phone is bigger (gesture) or smaller (gesture) than this phone (point)?” (students call out: Small! Smaller! etc.)

“Yes, a modern (point) phone is smaller (gesture) than this phone (point). Does a modern phone fit in your pocket (gesture or sketch to establish meaning)?” (students call out: Yes! Pocket! etc.)

“Yes, a modern phone is portable (write in the course language and, if it not an obvious cognate, in the class’s stronger shared language as well). It fits in your pocket (gesture or indicate the sketch/words). Is this phone (point) portable (point to word(s))?” (students call out: No! Not portable! No pocket! etc.)

“Yes, a modern (point) phone is smaller (gesture) and portable (point to the word) and it fits in your pocket (gesture and/or point to the word/sketch). Is a modern phone more convenient (write in the course language and perhaps also in the class’s stronger shared language to establish meaning)?” (students call out: Convenient! More convenient! Yes! etc.)

“Yes, a modern (point) phone is smaller (gesture) and portable (point to the word) and it fits in your pocket (gesture and/or point to the word/sketch) and it is more convenient.

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Look (gesture) at this phone (point). “The Jetsons” was a TV show (sketch, write, and/or teach a gesture to establish meaning) - the Jetsons (writing and spelling in the course language) J-E-T-SO-N-S. The show was from the year 1962 (write) and it showed the future (write in the course language and the class’s stronger shared language if the word “future” is not a close cognate, as it is in French) - 2062 (write). Is the year now 2062 (point) or 2021?”

(students call out: 2021!)

“Yes, it is 2021 - do we have phones like this phone from the TV show (point to the sketch) the Jetsons? Do we have video (point and, if the word is not an obvious cognate, write in the course language and perhaps the class’s stronger shared language to establish meaning) phones in 2021?” (students call out: Yes! Video! We have video phones in 2021! etc.)

“Yes, we have video phones (point) in 2021. Is this video phone (point) from the TV show (point) the Jetsons, from the year 1962 (point), is it bigger (gesture) or smaller (gesture) than a modern (point) phone?” (students call out: Bigger! Bigger than a modern phone! etc.)

“Yes, this video phone (point) from the TV show (point) the Jetsons, from the year 1962 (point) is bigger (gesture) than a modern video phone. Is this video phone (point) from the Jetsons (point) portable (point)?

Does this video phone (point) fit in your pocket (gesture and/or point to the sketch/word)?” (students call out: No! No pocket! etc.)

“Yes, this video phone (point) does NOT (gesture “not”) fit in your pocket (point/gesture). Is this phone (point) or a modern (point) phone more convenient (point to the word(s) you wrote previously)?” (students call out: Modern! More convenient! Modern phone! etc.)

Continue in this fashion to discuss all four slides that are pictured on the voting slide. You can “angle” the question for the vote however you want.

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For beginners, you will most likely want to stick to more concrete questions, such as “our favorite picture” or “the best technology.” With more advanced students, you might ask students to vote for “the most convenient” or “the most-changed technology” since the olden days. Teachers, I *know* that the nineties and even the eighties don’t seem like the “olden days” to us, but then I think about how in 1994 (the year I graduated from high school), the year 1967 seemed like ancient history to me, and then I think about how 1994 is just as “ancient” to kids now as 1967 was for me when I was 17. And then I understand how recent the “olden days” can actually be.

You can also prepare two sets of four slides - a total of eight - and two voting slides. This is particularly useful in a block class, as you can use the first four slides in the first part of Guided Oral Input and the second set in the second part of Guided Oral Input.

If you have two voting slides, then you might want to have four images of old tech on one of the voting slides, with which students can vote on the “most different from the modern day” image, and a second voting slide with four images of modern tech, with which students can vote on “the most useful modern-day tech.”

After about 10 to 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input, you will want to make sure that you move on to the voting slide, and conduct a brief vote, before it is time in the class session to move on to Scaffolded Oral Review, so you will only want to spend about two to three minutes - maximum - per slide, briefly introducing and discussing each one, and leaving at least two or three minutes to conduct the vote before moving on.

Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “Finish My Sentence” strategy, see Session Five “OK, we are going to play a game called ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact from what we just learned, in French, and then you will all speak in French as much as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts that we learned, or add on other facts that you know. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point. If you cannot keep talking in French for the whole six seconds, I will get a point.”

If you want to explain again in the course language, it might go something like this:

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You will get with a partner.

I will begin a sentence in French.

Partner B will speak in French.

I will count to ten.

Partner A will encourage Partner B.

If you speak in French for ten seconds, the class gets a point!

“Number One. (hold up one finger) The video phone on the Jetsons TV show from 1962 is…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “big, not convenient, not modern.” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Ten! Good job, a point for the class!”

(Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Question Two. Modern phones are…”

(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

Repeat with more sentences, if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Sessions 13 and 14, adding two or three new terms to it today. Please see the Shared Writing in Session 14 for a more detailed explanation of how to add new terms to the anchor chart. Additionally, please see the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing.

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Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today:

Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language.

Note: Some teachers like to make pre-printed sheets that already have the goal box and clip art of a basketball, soccer, or other goal.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language) is to describe in the past (point to the word “past” on the chart) and present (point to the word “past” on the chart). Today our goal is to use these words (write “n’était pas aussi” (was not as) and “est plus” (is more) in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Write: Technology Say: Technology that was MORE portable (gesture/point to the words/images) or Technology that was LESS portable?

Students: Less! or Less portable! or Technology that was less portable! etc.

Write/Say: Technology that was less portable… Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Write/Say: Technology that was less portable than in 2021.

Say and write: Old phones are…

Say: Old phones are NOT as small, or old phones are as small as modern phones?

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Students: NOT! or Not as small! or Not as small as modern phones! etc.

Say and write: Old phones are not as small as…not as small as phones in 2021 or not as small as modern phones?

Students: Modern! or 2021! or Not as small as modern phones! etc.

Say and write: Old phones are not as small as modern phones. Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Read/Recycle: Technology that was less portable than in 2021. Old phones are not as small as modern phones.

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to describe in the present and past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart — but SPARINGLY! You do NOT need to add every single new term to the chart; that can get very cumbersome. After you have written two to five sentences, depending on time, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Everyone Acts This strategy is an excellent “bridge” to the next lessons, from Cycle Two (Narration), in which the literacy strategies (and anchor charts) will focus on narrating actions in the past, with dialogue and inner thinking to show the characters’ reactions and personalities. It is a “bridge” because, here in the last Description session, you will begin having students think/ speak aloud, as they re-enact possible thoughts and statements that someone might make regarding the descriptive topic you discussed today (in the example, old and new technology).

I first saw this strategy in a video called “TPRS in the Nineties,” by Susan Gross, a talented French teacher and pioneer of teaching with comprehensible input. Susan had her students partner up and portray the action of a story, each partner taking a role and reenacting the story, with half the class speaking simultaneously to portray the action of their assigned character, as Susie narrated and coached the whole class on their lines

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and actions. I was smitten by the idea of having all the students involved in the acting, instead of the usual “professional” actors, the students whose job it will be to act in class stories when they are “hired”).

This strategy is an excellent introduction to the job of actors, as it offers all the students, no matter how timid or retiring, the opportunity to get in on the acting action, from the safety and comfort of a partnership, and without anyone’s attention being directed at them, as all the other students are involved in their own acting partnership.

You might tell your students, speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, as you set up this activity the first few times, that they can “ham it up” as much as they want to, but your basic expectation is that they repeat their lines to their partner and use any gestures that you assign to the words, even if their gestures are not incredible examples of the time-honored French art of le mime, or pantomime.

If your class seems reluctant to participate, you might have them spend a couple of minutes drawing or fabricating props, which can make the acting more fun and also give shier students something to do with their hands as they act with their partner.

You can either direct the making of the props by speaking in the course language and modeling the drawing on the board or overhead, which means that you can use the prop-making time as an opportunity for more language input and also control the props that the partnerships have available during the acting, or you can give the class a couple of minutes to prepare independently, which means that everyone might have different props, and also that the use of students’ stronger shared language(s) will most likely rule during the propmaking time.

You might want to quickly retell the details that you intend to use when you begin “Everyone Acts,” before providing a few minutes of work time to prepare the props, so that students can jot down possible props that might be employed, as they listen. This retell, of course, also gives you an opportunity to provide another dose of input that reuses the language that students already interpreted during the preceding lesson components of Guided Oral Input, Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, and Shared Reading.

There are advantages to allowing students to make their own props that, for you, might outweigh the time spent working in the stronger shared language: it builds creativity and strengthens the bond between the partners, and might help less-eager actors to “warm up” to the upcoming guided speaking task.

When using Everyone Acts in a narrative lesson, you will already have established the character(s) that the actors will portray. However, when using this strategy with non-narrative lessons, with informational or, in this case, descriptive lessons, you will need to “fabricate” two characters who can speak and think about the details of the class discussion.

You can “fictionalize” some of the information and have students assume various roles to act out short vignettes that bring the information to life. For example, in this example of technology, you can fabricate two characters, perhaps a time traveler from 1962 and a modern-day person, or a character from the Jetsons and a modern-day person. The important thing when setting up your characters for this particular phase (describing in the past and present) is that the two characters naturally have different perspectives on the past and present. So, one of them needs to be more “old school” and the other needs to be more “modern,” however that makes sense for the specific information that you chose to present in this Visual Survey.

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You can just make up the dialogue on the spot, or you can pre-plan a short script that contains ideas and words that students have heard, written, read, or used in previous instruction.

You will simply retell the details of the class discussion in the course language, using the two characters to think and say various things about the information, modeling gestures that the various characters do, and indicating to the class to recreate the gestures in their partnership. You state the characters’ thoughts and dialogue, accompanied by gestures, and then pause and indicate that the students who are portraying that character are to repeat the line.

You can provide all the dialogue and narration, and simply have the actors repeat after you, or, with more advanced students, you can offer the opportunity to improvise a bit of dialogue by beginning a statement and having the actors finish it in their own way, in a similar fashion to the “Finish My Sentence” strategy that you have already used.

The activity might go something like this, after the example lesson provided in this session: “OK, you will get with a partner, and decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will be a time traveler (write “time traveler” in the course language and perhaps also in the class’s stronger shared language to establish meaning) from the year 1962, and Partner B will be a modern person from the year 2021. I will say your lines in French with gestures and emotions, and then the partner who has that role will repeat the line with gestures and emotions, then Partner A will do the same, taking turns to create a little scene in French.”

“Partner A, the time traveler (point to the word(s)), says (gesture), “I love (gesture) my phone!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language, “I love (gesture) my phone!”)

Note: To exhort your class to greater heights of dramatic artistry, and also make an opportunity to repeat the input another time, you can use the “No, No, Not Like That!” trick, as described below.

You will simply restate the actors’ line, insisting that the actor say it with MORE emotion, as modeled below.

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“No, no, Partner A, the time traveler (point) is VERY HAPPY (gesture or use your posture and/or facial expression to establish meaning). The time traveler says (say the line very dramatically and gesture very dramatically), “I LOOOOOVE (big gesture) my phone!!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language and, it is to be hoped, in a more dramatic fashion , “I looooove (gesture) my phone!”)

Continue on to Partner B, and perhaps return again to Partner A and, time permitting, cycling through another set of lines with both partners.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 16

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write sentences in French to retell the story of why I became a teacher Intermediate: write sentences in French to retell the story of why I became a teacher, giving details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits and sensory details of the setting Advanced: write a series of connected sentences in French to retell the story of why I became a teacher, giving details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits and sensory details of the setting, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: You will need students to submit stories to the Slide Talk (or think about stories they can sketch, if you plan to do Card Talk instead) for the lessons in Session 17, Card/Slide Talk about Personal Stories. See Session 17 for more details. You might assign this for homework or set aside about eight minutes at the end of the lesson today for them to brainstorm and, if you plan to use a slideshow, upload their images and format their slide in the class’s slideshow.

A Story Mountain is a graphic organizer that is familiar to many teachers and students, because it is widely used in Language Arts classes.

Writing on a copy of the graphic organizer, or creating it on the board or paper, you will narrate a story about your life (or another personal story, perhaps of another staff member or a celebrity your students admire. This French example uses the guide words “character,” “setting,” “motivation,” “problem,” “solution/changes,” and “lesson”. You can also use a blank version, as shown above.

In the example lesson below, you will see suggested ways to use the version of the story mountain with guide words.

To prepare a personal story about yourself, such as the example of “why I became a teacher,” you will want to brainstorm stories from your life and choose the one that you think will most appeal to your students. Generally, stories about your life that took place when you were as close in age as possible to your students’ actual age(s) are the most interesting and relatable to students. So, you might want to spend some time activating Page 301

your memories from when you were in high school, or even middle or elementary school, depending on your students’ age(s).

If you are following the suggested schedule for this phase, and you teach classes that are around 50 to 60 minutes long (or fewer), then you will tell a story using the Story Mountain graphic organizer in two lessons.

Therefore, you will want to prepare two stories (or plan to tell one story over the course of the two lessons, the first day telling the “bare bones” version of the story, and then the next day, retelling it with more details).

If you want to tell two stories about your own life, that is fine, of course. Most students enjoy hearing stories about their teachers, especially if you intentionally focus on stories of when you were near their own age, as modeled below in my example personal story of one of the many reasons why I became a teacher. (Spoiler alert: it was not for the fame and fortune.)

Another option for this second story, for variety’s sake, you might ask another staff member at school, whom your students admire or like, to tell you a story about themselves. You can either choose to ask them for a story about the same theme - in this example, “Why I Became a Teacher” - or just any interesting story about themselves at approximately the same age as your students.

I suggest that you use a blank copy of the story mountain to plan the details you will narrate. Remember that Guided Oral Input is only about 10 minutes, so you will only say one or two facts about each part of the story mountain. You will need to keep your story very simple, to “fit” the time constraints.

1. First, you will establish the character and setting.

You might want to model starting the story with the character talking or thinking, or with an action (this is a writing move that you will model in Shared Writing and on the anchor chart for this phase). The finished story would sound something like like: “I opened the door to geography class at First Presbyterian Day School. I was 14 years old. I thought, ‘This class is SO BORING.’ It was a normal spring day in Macon, GA. It was warm and sunny, and it was not cloudy.”)

2. Then, you will give your character a motivation, or fears, or hopes and dreams. You might begin this scene with the character thinking or talking about their fears, hopes, or dreams. The finished story would sound something like like: “I thought, “I hate this class. I said to my best friend Sachiko, ‘I am nervous. I did not study for the test. I hate this class!”

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3. Then, the problem gets worse. This is the “climax” of the story. The finished story would sound something like like: “Geography class was so boring. I thought, ‘Geography is interesting. But geography CLASS is BORING!’ I failed the test.”

4. Then, the problem gets solved or something changes for the character. The finished story would sound something like like: “I decided to study education.” For beginner students, you will not be able to provide a lot of abstract detail here. Remember that the goal of this story is NOT to create a fine, nuanced literary work but rather to serve as a vehicle for very simple narration that follows a basic story structure. So, you will want to resist the temptation to go “deep” and focus instead on simple, concrete plot points, in this first story of the year.

5. The “lesson” or “moral” of the story. For beginners, this might be conducted in the class’s stronger shared language, especially the first few times. For more advanced students, and even with your beginners, once they have become familiar with the Story Mountain, this is a nice opportunity to introduce idiomatic expressions and sayings/proverbs. You might offer a selection of common

sayings or proverbs in the course language, like the examples here, and ask students to choose the one that best fits this particular story. In the example story, I just wrote a possible lesson. You might ask your students to suggest possible morals or lessons, or simply tell them what you pre-planned.

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You can also choose to have students sketch and/or take notes on their own copy of the Story Mountain. You may ask them to write in the course language or in their stronger language(s), depending on their ability.

When choosing how to ask them to use the Story Mountain graphic organizer, please do so with the knowledge that even for more advanced students, in a comprehension-based language course, the objective is to understand the language used in the lesson, not to produce output. Therefore, it does not really matter if they demonstrate their comprehension by writing in the course language or another language, or simply by sketching. The reasons to choose to have your more advanced students take notes in the course language is not primarily for their language acquisition; hearing/reading and understanding messages that are delivered in the language is enough for students to develop their growing internalized language system, regardless of their level. However, advanced students in particular, and especially those who have had a more traditional, conscious-learning-oriented approach to language learning in previous courses, often will not rest until their teacher requires them to output in the course language.

For students like these, having them take notes in the language is often a way for them to calm down and feel like they are being “challenged” or “really using French.” So, you will need to consider your students’ personalities and needs when deciding how to ask them to use the Story Mountain graphic organizer, and other graphic organizers throughout the year.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, so that they can begin making Video Retells during Scaffolded Oral Review, beginning in Session 18. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Find That Cognate In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase One, shown here in French. The texts for this phase are diary entries that narrate personal stories.

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French Beginner

Again, since the Reading Workshop texts “pivot” to a new text type (diary entries, in this case), we are returning to the simplest, most familiar instructional strategy - Find That Cognate - to allow students some time to “settle in” to this phase and text type, if you are choosing to use our resources. Because this strategy was explained in detail in Session One, we will move on to the lesson procedures right away in this session.

For more details on this strategy, please review Session One. Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this diary entry to you in French, a true story about a girl from England who dropped her new phone in the sewer and got stuck in there trying to get it back. Then we will find cognates in the story.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, if you have set that job up, which I strongly suggest you do this week, if you still have not done so.)

(Read the text in the course language. Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘packet’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, package in English, is packet. P-A-C-K-E-T.” (Note: This sounds like: “Oui, pacquet en anglais est package. Pacquet: payyy-ahhh-sayy-queue (saying letters in French).”)

(Asking a more open-ended question, if time permits:) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, arrived in English, is arrived. A-R-R-I-V-E-D.”

Repeat with a couple of other cognates. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on Page 305

how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Display a blank Story Mountain, hand out copies to students and explain how to take notes (if you choose to have them use their own copy during the Guided Oral Input), and briefly introduce the personal story about your life or someone else’s.

“I’m going to tell you a story about why I became a teacher. Spoiler alert: It was because I failed a geography test in eighth grade. This story has five parts (show on the Story Mountain): (1) the characters (people) and setting (place), (2) the character’s motivations, (3) the problem, (4) some kind of change or learning and (5) the moral of the story.”

(You might have your class starter give the signal again, if you have been explaining in the class’s stronger shared language, to transition to the course language.)

“It was 1989 (write 1989) in Macon, Georgia (write), and I (write “me”, or write your name) was 14 years old (write “age 14”). I was in Ms. Klopp’s Geography class (write “Ms. Klopp” and “Geography” in the course language and translate if it is not a cognate) with my friend, Sachiko (sketch a person and write/spell the name) S-A-C-H-I-K-O.”

“I was NOT happy (gesture/use facial expression). I HATED (gesture) geography class!”

“Who in the class (gesture) hates (gesture) geography? Who (gesture) LOVES (gesture) geography?” (counting hands/responses) “One, two, three…five people hate (gesture) geography and one person LOVES (gesture) geography.”

“I LIKED (gesture) geography…but I HATED (gesture) geography CLASS. It was BORING (gesture, write, and/or assign a gesture to establish meaning).”

“I said (gesture) to Sachiko, ‘This class is STUPID (write if needed; it’s an obvious cognate in French) and BORING (gesture)! I hate (gesture) this class! I did not study (teach a gesture and/or sketch, write to establish meaning).”

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“I was nervous (gesture)…and bored (gesture). I was nervous (gesture) about the test. I had not (gesture) studied, because the class was BORING (gesture). I hated (gesture) geography class.”

Recycling back and reviewing: “It was 1989. How old was I? Was I four or fourteen years old?” (class calls out: 14! 14 years old! etc.)

“Yes, I was 14 years old in 1989. Was I in Oregon or Georgia?” (class calls out: Georgia!)

“Yes, I was in Georgia. Was I in Atlanta, GA, or Macon, GA?” (class calls out: Macon!)

“Yes, I was in Macon, GA. Was I in math class?” (class calls out: No! Geography! etc.)

“No, I was not in math class. Was I in French class?” (class calls out: No! Geography! etc.)

“No, I was not in French class. What class was I in?” (class calls out: Geography! Geography class! etc.)

“Yes, I was in Geography class. What was the teacher’s name?” (class calls out: Klopp! Ms. Klopp! etc.)

(continue asking questions as time permits and students are engaged, then finish the narration.)

“I failed the test! (write/sketch to establish meaning, and/or assign a new gesture)! I was SAD (gesture)!”

“I decided (sketch a lightbulb and/or write the word in the course language and, if it is not a cognate, in the class’s stronger shared language, and perhaps teach a gesture) to study education (write the word in the course language and, if it is not a cognate, in the class’s stronger shared language).

Class, think (gesture). Why (gesture) did I decide (point to lightbulb or gesture) to study education (point) if I hated (gesture) geography class (point) and failed the test (point)?” (students call out ideas, probably speaking in their stronger language(s).)

“I

decided (point) to study

education (point) because I LIKED (gesture) geography…but the CLASS (point) was so BORING (point and/or gesture)! I hated (gesture) the class!”

“What is the lesson (point to the graphic organizer)?” (students may call out in their stronger language(s) Page 307

or you might use a selection of proverbs/sayings, as shown.)

After about 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how much of the story you told, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. It is OK if you do not finish the story; you can return to it later, or simply leave your students curious, or finish narrating quickly in the class’s stronger shared language to get to the end of the plot.

True-False Quiz Move to your Review Spot. The True-False Quiz is a very simple review strategy. For more information, please see Session Two, where it is explained and modeled in greater detail.

“OK, time for a review quiz. It is true (gesture thumbs up) and false (gesture thumbs down).”

You might use a visual aid to reinforce the meaning of the words for “true” and “false” in your language, and/ or ask students, “Show me true, show me false” to help them learn and recognize the thumbs-up and thumbsdown gesture you are using.

“Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. In 1989 (point) I lived in Atlanta, GA….shhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh…In 1989 (point) I lived in Atlanta, GA.” (The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes,

FALSE! (gesture or use visual aid). In 1989, I did NOT (gesture) live in Atlanta, GA. Where did I live?” (Some students may call out, “Macon!”)

“Yes, in 1989, I lived in Macon, GA. I did NOT live in Atlanta, GA.” “Question two (hold up two fingers). True (gesture) or false (gesture)? I loved (gesture) geography class (point)….shhhh…. True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)…shhh… I loved (gesture) geography class (point).”

(The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes, FALSE! (gesture or use visual aid). Did I LIKE (gesture) geography class or did I hate (gesture) it?”

(The class calls out, “HATE!”) Page 308

“Yes, I hated (gesture) geography class! Did I hate GEOGRAPHY, or just the CLASS?” (The class calls out, “JUST THE CLASS!”) Repeat with more true-false questions if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will set up a new anchor chart for this new phase, and add two or three new terms to it today. As explained in pervious sessions, it is a good practice to not add more than a couple of new terms to the chart in any new lesson, even if you have to forego some of the language that came up in the lesson that would easily apply to the chart; you want the learning to be “sticky” and by limiting the number of new elements that you are introducing, you will help them to be more memorable and easier for learners to retain and work with. See the images below for an example of how you might set up the anchor chart for beginners in Cycle Two Phase One (Narrating Personal Stories) to hold language that is used to execute the language function of “narrating in the past.”

Please note that the captions are in grey font, which is used to denote information that I envision being delivered in the class’s stronger shared language, and black font, which denotes information delivered in the course language.

Set up a goal box on your Shared Writing paper.

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing.

Your Shared Writing might sound something like this today: Draw a box and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language. Some teachers make pre-printed Shared Writing sheets that already have the goal box and clip art of a basketball, soccer, or other goal.

“Our goal (point to the word “goal” in the course language) is to narrate the plot in the past, and especially to show what the characters are feeling and thinking. Today our goal is to use these words (write “a pensé” and “a dit” in the course language in the box). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Say/Write: The Story of…The Story of Ms. Hargaden or the story of Page 309

the boring (gesture) class? (students: The story of the boring class! or The boring class!)

Say/Write, crossing out any words that need to be changed: The Story of the Boring Class

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden Capital M-S-period-space-Capital H-A-R-G-A-D-E-N (any proper name or obvious cognate is a great chance to get in some spelling to reinforce the names of the components of the written system in your language). Ms. Hargaden was in geography class or math class? (students: geography!)

Say/Write: was the geography class FUN (gesture) or boring (gesture)? (students: Boring! or The class was boring! etc.)

Say/Write: The geography class was boring (gesture) … Ms. Hargaden (spelling and writing in the course language) Capital M-S-period-space-Capital H-A-R-G-A-D-E-N…Did I like (gesture) the class, or did I HATE (gesture) the class? (students: HATE! or Hate the class! etc.)

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden…(writing and spelling in French) Capital H-Capital A-Capital T-Capital E-Capital D the class…the geography class or the stupid, boring (gesture) geography class? (students: the stupid boring geography class! or stupid, boring! etc.)

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden hated…the the stupid, boring (gesture) geography class…period or exclamation point (jot an exclamation point in the margins if needed; in French the words “capital,” “period,” “space,” and “exclamation point” are very close cognates; you may need to establish meaning in your language, if the terms are very different from the class's stronger shared language, or skip the details when you spell, such as the word “capital” and “period.”) (students: exclamation! exclamation point! etc.)

Say/ Write: Ms. Hargaden hated the the stupid, boring (gesture) geography class…exclamation point! One exclamation point, or two exclamation points, or three exclamation points? (students: three! three exclamation points! two! etc.)

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Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden hated the the stupid, boring (gesture) geography class…exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point!!! Ms. Hargaden…said (gesture) or thought (gesture)? (students: said! thought! etc.)

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden thought T-H-O-U-G-H-T… Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden thought…this class is boring (gesture) or Ms. Hargaden thought…this class is stupid and boring and I hate it! (students: boring! stupid! This class is boring and stupid! I hate it! etc.)

Say/Write: Ms. Hargaden thought this class is stupid and boring (gesture) and I hate (gesture) it!

Read/Recycle: The Story of the Boring Class. Ms. Hargaden was in stupid, dumb geography class. Ms. Hargaden thought this class is stupid and boring (gesture) and I hate (gesture) it!

Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Write Inside the Story Write Inside the Story is explained in more detail in Session Nine. Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more details in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might explain the activity in English and then repeat in the course language, as shown below.)

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We will write inside the text.

We will use the chart.

We will add to the text.

Give students time to work on their writing, perhaps working with a partner, if you think that will be helpful to them.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 17

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to retell the story of a good or bad trip someone in class has taken, and add the characters’ thinking and dialogue Intermediate: say sentences in French to retell the story of a good or bad trip someone in class has taken, and add the characters’ thinking and dialogue, details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits, and sensory details of the setting Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to retell the story of a good or bad trip someone in class has taken, and add the characters’ thinking and dialogue, details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits, and sensory details of the setting, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: You will use students’ slides with pictures and perhaps additional information they added to the slide (for the Slide Talk variation) or cards with sketches (for the original Card Talk strategy) that illustrate personal stories from their lives. In this example, students submit stories of good and/or bad trips they have taken. This slideshow is available to download from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or of course you could easily make your own slideshow.

If you want to focus on certain themes or topics (school, careers, travel, activities, coming of age, beauty and aesthetics, etc.) you can “angle” the topic of the stories you ask students to submit, to elicit stories that focus on an aspect of the topic. For example, if you want to address the theme of beauty and aesthetics, you might ask for stories about good and bad experiences with personal beautifcation (e.g. a great haircut, a very unfortunate fashion disaster, or The Worst Hair Day Ever).

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, as the lessons will begin using the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy of Video Retells in Session 18, the next session in the instructional sequence. See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

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French beginner reading

Pronunciation Practice See the notes in Session Three for detailed instructions on how you might conduct this Reading Workshop strategy.

In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase One, in French. Note that the story of Marie Antoinette would be familiar to students who, using the resources from our Teachers Pay Teachers store, have

already had a lesson on Marie Antoinette’s life, in Cycle One Phase Four. If your students have not done that lesson, this reading might look too challenging for them. You can always choose to use a text that your class produced in a previous lesson during Shared Writing, which is, in many ways, the preferable option, since the text will be customized to the class’s experiences and - because they helped to create it - highly comprehensible, even for beginners.

The Reading Workshop texts for this phase are diary entries to tell personal stories. Other levels of the example reading are shown below in German.

German beginner reading

German intermediate reading

German advanced reading

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language.

“I will read this diary entry to you in French, about a story from Marie Antoinette’s life.” (read in the course language) “Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

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(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so that students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ even more. Like this. Listen.”

(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, if time permits. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then the Card/Slide Talk.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/ transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Display the slideshow, and briefly introduce the topic.

“Let’s look at the stories of good and bad trips that people in class have taken.”

“Class, look (gesture) at Tina’s trip (point to the image).

“Tina went to Hawaii (place your hand under an image to support comprehension of what you are saying, and perhaps write the word “Hawaii” in the course language and perhaps also in the class’s stronger shared language).”

“Tina, when did you go to Hawaii? 2021 (jot the numeral, if needed to establish the meaning)? 2022 (jot)? (using the “What Am I Asking This Kid?” Trick, and speaking in the stronger shared language) What am I asking Tina?” (some students call out, “When did you go to Hawaii?” or “When was your trip?” etc.)

“Yes! Tina, when did you go to Hawaii? 2021? 2022?”

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(the student responds, in the course language or their stronger language, “2019.”)

“Tina went to Hawaii in 2019 (jot). Who in the class (gesture) has been to Hawaii?” (students raise hands) (counting in the course language) “One, two, three…five people in class have been to Hawaii.”

“Tina went to the beach (place your hand under an image to support comprehension and perhaps write in the course language and maybe also the class’s stronger shared language) in Hawaii.”

“Tina, did you like (gesture) the bea…(“lightly” interrupting the last word to implement the “What am I asking this kid?” Trick) What am I asking Tina?” (some students call out, “Did you like the beach?” etc.)

“Yes! Tina, did you like (gesture) the beach in Hawaii?”

(Tina responds, in the course language or their stronger language, “Yes,” or perhaps, “Yes, I liked the beach.”

If the student begins to tell a bunch more additional facts in their stronger language, you will need to gently cut them off, to send the message that you want just a couple of words and not a full-tilt treatise on their opinion on various beaches.)

Continue with other facts about the first student’s trip, or move on to other slides, as time permits. You will, if you follow the schedule given in this book, return to the slideshow in a subsequent lesson(s), and so you do not need to feel any pressure to cover all the slides in one Guided Oral Input session, which is, after all, only about ten minutes long (or twenty in block classes).

You do not need to feel any pressure to cover all the slides, in any lesson, or to linger with a topic/strategy until you have been able to use each and every slide. This can lead to extreme bouts of tedium for both students and teachers.

You can, if you want to use all the slides/information students submitted, make a class book out of the slides, as described in Session 12, and pictured here.

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

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Who Said What?

Move to your Review Spot.

This strategy asks students to imagine what someone would say or think in reaction to various situations that are related to the facts you discussed during Guided Oral Input.

You will make a series of three to five statements that a member of the class could have possibly said, based on what you learned in the survey, and ask who said, or would have said, each one.

You will say something that one of the students could have said, and ask the class, “Who said that?”, “Who would say that?”, or “Who would have said that?”

You can provide more repetitions of the language by restating the person and what they said, for example, “Marquisse would have said, ‘I love the beach in Mexico!”

For more advanced students, you can also choose to ask the class to explain why the person said, or would have said, that statement, for example, “Marquisse would have said, ‘I love the beach in Mexico!’ Why would he say that?”

“Time to review. I will pretend to be someone in class, and your job is to say who might say that. You will hear the answer twice. The first time, listen, don’t talk. The second time, say who would have said it.” (explaining the directions again in the course language) “I will say (gesture)…

Say (gesture) means say. Show me “say” (gesture). Show me “look” (gesture). “Prefer” (gesture). “Love” (gesture). “Talk” (gesture). “Like” (gesture). “Say” (gesture).”

“I will say (gesture) a sentence in French. I will say (gesture) the sentence two (hold up two fingers) times.”

“The first time (hold up one finger) listen. Do not talk (gesture). “

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“The second time (hold up two fingers), you will say (gesture) who in class would have said (gesture) that.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger). Who would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) the pyramids in Mexico (point to the image/word)!’…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) the pyramids in Mexico (point to the image/word)!’?”

Students call out: Marquisse! Dré! etc.

“Yes, Marquisse would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) the beach in Mexico (point to the image/word)!’

Dré would have said (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) the beach in Mexico (point) too!”

“Would Dré say (gesture) ‘I love (gesture) the beach in Hawaii (gesture and/or point to the image/ words)’….shhhh…or ‘I DON’T LIKE (gesture) the beach in Hawaii’? Shhhh…..Would Dré say I love (gesture) the beach in Hawaii (gesture and/or point) or or ‘I DON’T LIKE (gesture) the beach in Hawaii’?”

Students call out: Love! I love the beach in Hawaii! etc.

“Number Two. (hold up two fingers). Who would have said (gesture) ‘I celebrated Christmas in Waikiki’ (gesture and/or point to the image/words)…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) ‘I celebrated Christmas in Waikiki’ (gesture and/or point to the image/words)?”

Students call out the answer, and you might ask follow-up questions as modeled above.

Ask more questions, if time permits.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 16, adding two or three new terms to it today. You may need to be selective, if you used many new words to narrate during the Card/Slide Talk discussion.

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session 9 for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions.

First, add about two new terms to the anchor chart (this example uses three, which is about the max that most students can handle at one time).

“Today our goal is to use these words (write “a visité” (visited) and “a voyagé” (traveled) and “est allé.e” (went) in the course language in the box, and perhaps add sketches to reinforce the meaning, as pictured.). We will get a point every time we use one of these words, so look for ways to use Page 318

them in the sentences. OK, let’s go!”

Draw a box on your Shared Writing paper, and write/sketch the word “Goal” in the course language, or use a preprinted sheet with a goal box.

Say/Write: The Trip…

…or The AMAZING (you can establish the meaning of a word such as this, when you are introducing it in a meaningful, comprehensible context such as Write and Discuss, simply using gestures and intonation, saying it in a “marvelous” way as illustrated below) trip?

(students: Amazing! or The amazing trip! etc.)

Say/Write: The amazing trip…the amazing trip of Marquisse…or the amazing trip? (students: Marquisse! or The amazing trip of Marquisse! etc.)

Say/Write: The amazing trip of Marquisse (spelling in the course language as you write) Capital M-A-Q-U-I-S-S-E… the amazing trip of Marquisse, or the amazing trip of Marquisse and his family, or the amazing trip of Marquisse and his parents (“parents” is a very direct cognate in French, but if your language does not have an applicable cognate, you might want to skip this, or establish meaning

by

sketching, writing, and/or teaching a gesture)? Marquisse, or Marquisse and his family, or Marquisse and his parents?” (students: His parents! or Marquisse and his parents! etc.)

Say/Write: The amazing trip of Marquisse and his parents. The amazing trip of Marquisse and his parents to Mexico, or to Kentucky?

(students: Mexico!)

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Say/Write: The amazing trip of Marquisse and his parents to Mexico.

Marquisse went to Mexico (you might point to the word/ sketch on the anchor chart) or Marquisse VISITED (point to the word if needed to reinforce the meaning) Mexico…or Marquisse TRAVELED (point) to Mexico? (students: Went to Mexico! or Visited! or Traveled to Mexico! or Traveled! etc.)

Say/Write: The amazing trip of Marquisse and his parents to Mexico. Marquisse went to Mexico.

Good job! (put a check or tally mark in the goal box because you used one of the goal words.)

Say/Write: He visited…class, did Marquisse visit (point to the anchor chart) pyramids (sketch or point to the slide, if needed to reinforce the meaning) in Mexico? (students: Yes! Pyramids! Visited the pyramids! etc.)

Say/Write: He visited (point) pyramids in Mexico…class, did he visit the beach, too? (students: Yes! Beach! Visited the beach! etc.)

Say/Write: and he went (point to the anchor chart if needed) to the beach there, also.

Note that the words “there” and “also” have not previously been taught.

You can, again, rely on the context to support comprehension.

And if not all students understand precisely, exactly what you are writing…

…that is actually desirable.

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Wait, I hear you thinking, “Just wait one blamed minute there Tina…isn’t this comprehensionbased language teaching?

Why would I want to be - even slightly, or briefly - NOT comprehensible?!?”

Let’s take a gander at a couple of Dr. Stephen Krashen’s terms, and maybe it will make more sense. The first one is “i + 1.”

This is a term from Dr. Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, developed in the 1970s and 80s, that describes the optimal “richness” (or, to put it another way, the optimal “slight unknown-ness”) of the input we provide.

If i is the level of input that students can comprehend with 100% confidence, then if we continue to only provide input at that level, then learners will not develop further. We are actually going for the level “i + 1” — language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. In the “formula” i + 1, the "i" is the learner's current level of ability to comprehend, and the “+ 1" is the next level of language acquisition.

In 2015, Dr. Krashen added another consideration to the notion of “how comprehensible is optimal?” when he wrote about the concept of the “Illusion of Transparency.”

He writes, in the 2015 article, “TPRS: Contributions, Problems, New Frontiers, and Issues,” that “input is transparent if the acquirer understands every word. This is, of course, a crude definition. We could define extreme transparency as a conscious understanding of not only every word but every grammatical marker and morpheme. Transparent is not the same as “comprehensible.” If input is transparent, it is comprehensible, but input can be comprehensible and not fully transparent, that is, it could contain some as yet unacquired language that does not interfere with comprehension (‘noise’).”

The examples of “noise” above are carefully calibrated to be just a bit of new language, just a bit of “unknownness.” They are purpose-designed to introduce just enough “noise” to create optimal conditions for language acquisition, and for learning in general. They set up situations in which students are likely to experience “cognitive dissonance,” which - used judiciously and with the teacher’s guidance to resolve - is a powerful education tool.

Social psychologist Leon Festinger first described “cognitive dissonance” in 1957, as the state of mind induced when a learner holds two contradictory beliefs. Since this situation produces discomfort, the learner is more motivated to change one of the beliefs to avoid being inconsistent. Much research has been conducted since then to demonstrate the desirability for learners to experience this cognitive dissonance. It is applicable to many disciplines, perhaps most notably in public health and social justice/ anti-racist learning. However, in Page 321

a smaller way, it is very much applicable to Write and Discuss.

When we simply use a new term, in the very controlled, scaffolded, mostly-comprehensible context of Write and Discuss, students will be “forced” to formulate their own inner theory for what that word means. Even if they do not consciously say to themselves, “Why, I do declare that I would suppose that “là-bas, aussi” (“there, too” from the French example above) means “there, also,” based upon the context of the aforementioned terms,” their language acquisition device automatically attempts to make the unknown language make sense, using the context and the learner’s existing literacies.

Because we simply use the new term, and move on, without stopping to define or belabor it, students may experience a brief, slight feeling of “wait, wait, what up?” before they are whisked away to another utterance (which, because Write and Discuss is designed to be super-duper comprehensible, will most likely calm their emotions, because they will understand so clearly). However, the daily instructional framework is designed to remedy this “cognitive dissonance” in the next part of the lesson: Shared Reading, where we do involve the conscious mind in making the class’s text “transparent” when we translate every single word, exactly.

Because some students may have formulated an erroneous “theory” as to the meaning of the new word (e.g. “là-bas, aussi), when they first encountered it during Shared Writing, they have a chance to, during the Shared Reading, gain conscious knowledge of the meaning that the class/teacher assign to it as you translate. This creates the situation of “cognitive dissonance” as they must revise their original thinking and integrate it with the new knowledge.

Please note that you do not want to overdo it! You want your students to be "forced" to take a guess as to the meaning of just a few terms in the Write and Discuss. Not too many, and not words that are critical to understanding the meaning. Just little expressions/phrases here and there.

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It is possible to overdo this, or have too much of a good thing. If students experience too much cognitive dissonance, they lose motivation.

However, with just a little, especially in the context of what is, by now, a super-familiar daily experience — Write and Discuss followed by Shared Reading — you can tap into this powerful element of human psychology every single day.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Everyone Acts This strategy was first introduced in Session 15, and you can find a more detailed explanation of it there.

When using this strategy in a narrative lesson, like the one in this session, you will already have established the character(s) that the actors will portray. If you have only discussed one character, you will need to have a pair, so you can invent another character: a friend, family member, teacher, or even their “truthful self” and their “lying self” (which allows you to set up imaginary debates that feel a lot like those cartoon devils and angels on people’s shoulders) or their “younger self” and their “self self” or their “future self.”

You will simply make up the dialogue on the spot, or you can use dialogue and thinking from the Shared Writing text that you added using the anchor chart, if you have included it. If you have not included very much dialogue or thinking in your Shared Writing texts, you can take a slightly different approach, and use the “Write Inside the Story” strategy introduced in Session Nine, instead of “Everyone Acts,” and ask students to write with you “inside” one of the Write and Discuss texts to add dialogue and thinking. Since this session is designed to be repeated over at least two, if not three or more, Page 323

class periods, on the first day that you discuss the Card/Slide Talk, you can prepare a text by loading it up with a lot of dialogue and thinking, and then use it with the “Everyone Acts” strategy in the second lesson of this session.

You can also use a Shared Writing text that does not contain any dialogue or thinking, and just make up some lines that the characters can say/think.

The activity might go something like this, after the example lesson provided in this session: “OK, you will get with a partner, and decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will be Marquisse, and Partner B will be Marquisse’s cat, Butterbeer Belly. I will say your lines in French with gestures and emotions, and then the partner who has that role will repeat the line with gestures and emotions, then Partner A will do the same, taking turns to create a little scene in French.”

“Partner A, Marquisse, (point to the word(s)), says (gesture), “I visited pyramids in Mexico!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language, “I visited pyramids in Mexico!”)

Note: To exhort your class to greater heights of dramatic artistry, and also make an opportunity to repeat the

input another time, you can use the “No, No, Not Like That!” trick, as described below.

You will simply restate the actors’ line, insisting that the actor say it with MORE emotion, as modeled below.

“No, no, Marquisse is VERY HAPPY (gesture or use your posture and/or facial expression to establish meaning). Marquisse says (say the line very dramatically and gesture very dramatically), “I visited the PYRAMIDS in MEXICOOOOOOO!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language and, it is to be hoped, in a more dramatic fashion , “I visited the pyramids in Mexico!”)

Continue on to Partner B, and perhaps return again to Partner A and, time permitting, cycling through another set of lines with both partners.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 18

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write words or phrases in French to answer questions about a story from French literature Intermediate: write sentences in French to answer questions about a story from French literature Advanced: write a series of connected sentences in French t to answer questions about a story from French literature, giving details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits and sensory details about the setting, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: Visual Stories are a versatile strategy that can be used to narrate any story, with visual support for comprehension. You can either draw the information as you teach, or you can use a prepared series of images, such as a slideshow, to present information to students step by step as the story unfolds. Both options are described at great length in this introductory section to Session 18.

The example lesson in this session will use a slideshow from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) about a literary story from France during the late medieval period, Le Livre de la Cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) by Christine de Pizan. You can find other Visual Stories, from the literary traditions of various languages, on our Teachers Pay Teachers store, or use the example as a model to create your own slideshow or series of images.

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Adjusting the Length of Prepared Slideshows to Fit Your Students’ Abilities Please note that the slideshow is quite long, and so in my actual lesson, I most likely would not plan to use all the slides, but rather would prioritize the images that I want to focus on. My goal is almost always to finish the story in one class session, even if it is very simple. I can always return to it again later, but I really do like to have that feeling of closure, that we don’t have a bunch to catch up on next time, because I really don’t like to eat leftover lesson plans for lunch!

So, please, when you are planning your Visual Story, especially if you are using our resources, just know that they are designed to keep even the most advanced students in a block period engaged, so there are a LOT of slides in most of the Visual Stories.

You will quickly get a feel for how many slides your own classes can easily use in one session of Guided Oral Input. You will most likely find that your different classes are driving down German Highway in different gears, with some able to use all the slides, and others needing you to go really slow. You can use the same resource with all the levels, and simply remove non-essential slides for your classes that are in first gear, but leave more slides in for your fifth-gear jackrabbits.

This session begins with a very detailed explanation of Visual Stories, one of the most enjoyable and powerful strategies in the whole book, for most people (including your humble author). Here goes nothin’!

Why Tell Stories?

The experience of comprehending an entire story from beginning to end with no interruptions is very satisfying to students, and so telling a visual story makes for an enjoyable and relaxing lesson for students and teacher.

A visual story is presented as a finished product, much like Story Hour at the library. They can allow you to bring in cultural and historical information, such as - in this phase - stories from literature written in your course language, or - in Cycle Two Phase Three, cultural tales such as legends and folklore.

Telling tales from the cultures that speak our languages is, thus, a natural way to bring in culture, while also avoiding the pitfalls associated with “teaching culture” (perpetuating shallow understandings and stereotypes, for instance). What is more culturally-authentic than enjoying a story that many people in our languagespeaking communities grew up hearing?

Using a prepared story that you have practiced and know well and are excited to present to your students benefits both your students and you, as the teacher. Students benefit because they hear copious amounts of visually-supported input, and it is especially engaging when it is delivered in narrative format, which is an ancient and deeply human way for our brains to organize and remember information.

Stories, especially those that have stood the test of time, such as the literary tales used in this phase of the Narration cycle, activate our brains in a way that other genres do not; in fact, I have learned from my friend and colleague, Erica Peplinski, a talented Spanish teacher from Michigan, who has an extensive background in biology and brain research, that we have an entire system in our brains - the mentalizing system - that has evolved specifically to allow us to interpret social information, including stories.

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By telling stories, or creating characters and stories with our students, or discussing people in class, and their lives, feelings, and experiences, we are tapping into the power of the mentalizing system. Because the mentalizing system predates our higher-level cognition, in terms of the evolution of the human brain, we are hardwired to prefer that system to our higher cognitive functions.

When we teach with stories and socially-meaningful information (such as calendar talk and class surveys), we are giving our students the language input they need to acquire language, and we are also creating lessons that allow them - and us! - to make satisfying social connections, and light up the system that we naturally prefer - the “social stories” system, our mentalizing processes.

Teachers benefit, too, as they can gain a sense of control over what, for many of us, is an extremely daunting prospect: telling stories to groups of youngsters in a language that they are far from proficient in. For me, when I began my journey as a communication-based language teacher, I relied almost exclusively on creating stories with my class. This was in 2004 and 2005, when I was a new teacher, and back then co-creating stories was one of the only strategies I had at my disposal.

Why This Book Begins with Prepared Stories Before Co-Created Stories While my students and I truly enjoy creating stories together, and I was, for the first eleven years or so of my language teaching career, a passionate adherent to primarily story-based language instruction, it was a lot of work! And the work was not always just work work; it was emotional work. It was not always easy, or even possible, for me to be in a mental state that allowed me to feel confident heading into class with only a story outline, knowing that my students and I would need to create a story from “scratch” almost every day. Many of our stories were hilarious, super-engaging, memorable “home runs,” but many others felt clunky and cumbersome and struggled to get off the ground and take flight. This uncertainty, day in and day out, took a huge emotional toll on me. And I know, from listening to other teachers, that I am most assuredly not alone in this.

So, branching out from this steady diet of co-creating stories “from scratch” and began to experiment, after a decade of steady story-creating, to telling prepared stories I selected and rehearsed, with pre-planned visual scaffolding, was quite a welcome relief for me indeed, and this is why I have arranged the narration strategies in Stepping Stones to begin with narrative strategies that are not story creation, but rather storytelling.

In the next session, you will venture into the super-satisfying realm of story creation, using some of the One Word Images that you produced in Cycle One, Phase Three. I am confident that the suggestions you will read in the next session will make co-creating stories feel a lot more structured and successful. Just the fact that you will begin the story with one of the class’s characters in the starring role will get you on more solid footing than you may have experienced when telling stories “from scratch,” which is, even for very experienced people, not an easy task.

My intention is that by the time you set out to create your first story in Session 19, that you will have developed confidence and skills through your work with stories in Sessions 16, 17, and the current session, 18, using more “controlled” and prepared instructional strategies like the Story Mountain used in Session 16, Card/Slide Talk about personal stories used in Session 17, and Visual Stories in this session.

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Starting with Childhood Favorites Visual stories can, obviously, be used to introduce students to a whole world of authentic cultural information through folktales and legends from the cultures that speak our languages, and the example lesson in this session dives right into a culturally-authentic tale from French medieval literature.

However, if you feel that your students - or you - might be overwhelmed by the complexity of the literary stories like the one used in the example lesson, you might choose to begin instead with a simple, familiar tale that exhibits the classic fairy-tale pattern of “three”. The Three Little Pigs is a good option, because it is simple, familiar, and easy to illustrate because the plot is so concrete. It also follows the time-tested (and easy on the teacher) fairy tale “rule of three” (e.g. the THREE Billy Goats Gruff, the THREE Little Pigs, the THREE Wishes).

It is a happy coincidence that stories based on this “rule of three” also provide copious repetitions of the language, so you do not have to think about how to scaffold comprehension of as many different words, and students have more opportunities to re-hear and re-process the same words and expressions at least three times during the story, after which they will go on to hear many more repetitions of this language, in the rest of the daily instructional framework.

The most important factor to consider when preparing your Visual Story is:

How will you make each element of the plot comprehensible, in the moment of telling it?

It is important to note that I am not talking here about teaching them each and every word in the story, or “preteaching” vocabulary. I take a firm position against the “pre-teaching” of vocabulary prior to using it in a meaningful context. It’s not that I think it’s “take it or leave it.” I truly think that it is DETRIMENTAL to your development as a teacher, to your students’ learning, and to your overall happiness and longevity in the comprehension-based teaching biz.

Down with Pre-Teaching Vocab and UP with YOUR TEACHING SKILLS! Here’s a rather harsh truth. Sorry-not-sorry in advance. If you need to hear this, if you need a little friendly kick in the seat to commit more fully to working on your skills, it is worth the harshness I have to now deploy.

Let’s get it over with, shall we? Here goes.

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If you feel the need to pre-teach vocab, then you most likely aren’t using enough scaffolding (sketches, pointing to pictures, using familiar graphic organizers, using gestures, all that) in the moment of teaching.so you need to work on your delivery skills so that you can simply USE the language to jump right into the “good stuff” — the content — instead of sort of “killing the joy” by pre-teaching vocabulary to the conscious mind.

Ow, that DOES kinda sting… it almost hurts my fingers to type that… but if you can accept this harsh reality, then you will be able to work on your skills, and you will find that your course just begins to establish a “flow” that, in my experience, and the experience of many teachers with whom I have worked, cannot be achieved by pre-teaching vocab prior to the “good stuff,” which is to say the COMMUNICATION and CONTENT that this book is carefully laying out like a buffet of knowledge and memorable experiences for you and your students.

Yeah, it’s a wee tiny bit harsh. But don’t feel bad. It’s a very common malady. I promise. There are lots of reasons that you are not achieving the foundational goal of this approach to instruction: speaking comprehensibly in the moment.

It could be that you are not in the habit of simplifying your information enough, so that you are trying to speak using too many words, or you have too much to “cover” and you are speaking too fast. It could also be that the topic is too abstract, which means you need to devise a way to make it more concrete or learn how to prioritize the essential information so that you can skip some of the more abstract parts.

It could be that you are not pausing to point and sweep the room with your eyes and do all the things that, when you read in Chapter Four on the importance of SLOW, you meant to do….but you have not yet watched enough of yourself on video, or you have not yet gotten the classroom management piece under control, or you just forget to go slow when you get excited, and the conversation is getting cooking and, well, you know how it is…

You.just.canthelpit.youjuststart.totalksofast.whenyougetcarriedaway causeforyou.Italianis.secondnature.andyouforget howhardit.canbeforbeginners!

It really could be any number of “teacher skills” that you, honestly, need to work on (which is why you’re reading this, right?) so that students are able to comprehend what you are saying in the moment, using the multi-layered scaffolding that you have baked into the lesson.

I refer you back to my exhortations, in earlier sessions, to video yourself and then - painful though it seems WATCH AN ENTIRE CLASS PERIOD EACH WEEK, if not more. You will grow exponentially. How I grew!

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I’m still catching up to myself, five years later, from the years I spent filming my teaching every day. It made me grow so fast in my comprehensibility skills.

Pre-teaching vocabulary, furthermore, can drain the joy out of the upcoming experience, when most people would rather just get to the fun stuff, the stories, so their mentalizing system, described in more detail above, can have a good time. And, lastly, pre-teaching vocabulary is less efficient. When we encounter words and expressions in a meaningful context, without focusing on the language but rather on the messages that are being delivered in the language, we remember better.

Teach LESS and you will actually teach MORE and BETTER. What a concept!

Students do not need to comprehend each and every word in the story in order to acquire the language. They do need to understand the messages that the language is delivering. So, the goal is to make the storyline comprehensible and give the students what Dr. Krashen calls “the illusion of transparency” - the feeling of following the plot of the story, explained in greater detail in Session 17.

You might want to consider these key supports to aid in their comprehension: 1. Writing cognates on the board so that students can “see” the English inside the L2 word 2. Writing in the course language and the class’s stronger shared language on the board (translation) 3. Sketching and changing/rearranging stick figures to represent the characters and action, for instance, changing a character’s face from smiling to frowning to denote a change in emotion.

4. Using voice intonation and gestures to enhance students’ understanding of the story.

The key point to remember when planning a story is to speak slowly and simply so that the students understand, even if it means rendering far less of the story than you wish.

Your main objective is to make the plot SIMPLE and understandable. Even if you were to tell the story of the TWO Little Pigs, because telling the story about the three would drag the story out past the 12-15 min. of Guided Oral Input time, go with understandable messages.

You will want to simplify the plot and the language (see the example of the Three Little Pigs below to see how simple “simple” actually is) so that the students can follow the plot. Please note that this does not mean that the language needs to be constrained or unnatural. For example, there is no need to ensure that the verbs all be in the present tense, or contain words only from the first-year textbook.

You can think of the goal more like simplifying the language to the point that you do not feel rushed in your telling of the story. I do not shy away from using “complex” vocabulary (I have literally been known to teach a gesture for the word “contains” on the very first day of first-year French and Spanish) and I am perfectly comfortable using “advanced” grammatical constructions, when they are needed, such as the past perfect or subjunctive, with any group of students.

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You are strongly encouraged to use the suggestions in this session to think through the flow of the story, to make sure that there are not too many sentences to “get through” in your “script.” You also want to rehearse the story and the visuals at the same time, drawing or looking at them as you speak, to make sure that the information you plan to convey is concrete enough to allow you to represent it visually. If not, you might want to skip that detail.

If the detail is so important that you can’t leave it out, you might want to think of a different way to say it, using concrete images or gestures to make it concrete. For example, in the story of the three little pigs, on the next page, the script I made myself does not use the “Little pig, little pig, let me come in,” and the “Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin” of tradition. Instead, I prepared the much more concrete statements, “Let me enter,” and “No, no, no!” Same general idea, but a lot less taxing to students’ noggins.

So I simplify the story, in most cases, by subtracting details and clauses from the sentences. By having less to narrate, you can focus more of your mental attention on the students’ comprehension.

When you read the planning sheet for the Three Little Pigs below, please think about how you see these ideas in action.

But before you go any farther, maybe take a little art break, and check out how to draw that handsome-looking wolf…and maybe try your paw at sketching a big, bad wolf of your own!

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Starting with a Professional, Proficient Storyteller When I prepare a Visual Story, especially as a non-native speaker of the languages I teach, I like to watch a short video of a proficient speaker narrating the tale I plan to tell. This allows me to learn the storyline as well as, usually, some new vocabulary, or at least to give me ideas for vocabulary that I do not generally use in communicating in the language. Words that are in my receptive vocabulary (i.e., I can recognize them and understand them when I read or hear them) do not often spring to mind when I plan on my own, because my receptive vocabulary - especially in my non-native language - is not as strong as what would come naturally to a more proficient speaker. As I listen to the video a few times, I take notes in L2, and from those notes, I plan my story - the language and visuals I will use when I tell it.

Now let’s look at the two options for preparing and delivering the information in class: the low-tech way and the digital way. We will start with the low-tech option.

The Low-Tech Option: Drawing in front of the class as you tell the story Telling stories with the support of drawings on the board is a time-tested way to provide comprehensible input. I was very excited, in 2016, to have the opportunity to learn about Story Listening by working with and learning from Dr. Beniko Mason, an English teacher from Japan, who has developed an entire language acquisition program that uses telling stories with drawings and leveled reading as the primary means of instruction. Dr. Mason’s extensive research over three decades has shown the effectiveness of providing input in this way.

For more information in Dr. Mason’s own words, please see the Story Listening Foundation. They have published the Story Listening Toolkit, written by Dr. Krashen and Dr. Mason, which can be used to support your storytelling. Visual Stories are not Story Listening; it is a standalone program. However, Dr. Mason’s research and tireless advocacy for high-quality comprehension-based instruction based on stories, both those told in class as well as those in written texts, as the foundation for higher levels of literacy development, has really energized my thinking about how powerful it can be to prepare a story that you, the instructor, loves and is excited to tell your class.

I suggest that you use a piece of paper as a planning sheet, to represent your whiteboard, to “lay out” the Visual Story step by step like you will tell it on the board, under the document camera, or on large format paper (such as chart paper). I will use the example of the Three Little Pigs to demonstrate this.

It is also a good idea to spend some time rehearsing the story, drawing and narrating it a couple of times using your planning sheet, to get comfortable with the delivery. In the lesson, some teachers find it useful to

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hold a copy of the story written in large letters so that they can read easily while teaching, while others prefer to use the planning sheet on which they have planned the drawings and other visual supports.

As you read the graphics below, please take note of how the teacher draws the story as it unfolds, bit by bit, phrase by phrase. Drawing on the board as the story unfolds is non-negotiable in a Visual Story. You do not have to be an amazing artist. Quick sketches are best, as they keep the plot line moving along. If you need help with your drawing skills, you might check out the books Make a World by Ed Emberly or Chalk Talks by Norma Shapiro, which contain simple templates for many different drawings.

Below, you will find a brief tutorial on how to draw a simple, yet quite cute, pig, followed by a sample practice sheet that could be used with this story.

Please note that on the practice sheet on the following pages, which I made in Canva, I show the parts of the story that I would write, and then some of them get erased.

This is, in reality, how I use the board. I learned the super-useful trick of drawing over characters’ faces to change their expressions from Dr. Mason, as well as the advice to write sparingly, and then erase the words as the story goes on, to clear more space on the board as students become more familiar with the terms.

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Little Pig s in my Th e sto ry of the Th ree cla ss nch first-yea r Fre

Preparing a Slideshow or Printed Images You can also use a slideshow of prepared images to narrate the story bit by bit, to replicate the drawing-infront-of-the-class experience of allowing students to see the story unfold with a visual to support their comprehension of each new word and utterance.

To do this, you will prepare a series of images that you will use to narrate the story, prior to class. These can be on physical pieces of paper, printed out from the internet, or simply drawn on large pieces of paper (cutting Page 336

A Na rrative Inp ut Ch art usi ng prepa red im age s, fro m Su mm er Instit ute s in

a piece of pasteboard (aka “posterboard”) into four squares makes good-sized images), or they could be put into a slideshow, such as the one in the example lesson from our Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Here are some pictures from Summer Institutes of a lesson in which I used drawings to narrate a story about the life of BelgianRwandan recording artist Stromae.

If you draw the images yourself, you could use the “project from the internet” trick to help you draw better. You tape the blank paper on the wall, project an image from an internet search onto it, and lightly trace the outlines, using pencil. Blue or green color pencils are the best, I have found, but your run-of-the-mill graphite works fine, too. Then you can go back and color over them, or have a student helper do this for you. Your students will not be able to see the light tracing from their seats, and unless you reveal your magician’s tricks, they will be marveling, mouths likely agape, at your artistic prowess.

See the images below for some tips on how to use this amazing trick.

Hang large paper behind the projected image.

Students will see what looks like a blank paper.

Lightly trace the outlines.

You will have the guide lines for your drawing in class.

Trace over the outlines in marker as you teach.

Get ready to feel like the World’s Greatest Artist!

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On the back of each picture, you can write a short “script” in your course language (I usually like to get this from an online source written in the language, since I am not a native speaker) that you will say as you present the images. You will want to simplify the language and prioritize the facts that are visually represented in the images. About two to four sentences per image is a good rule of thumb. For beginners, you will want simpler, shorter sentences, with simple vocabulary that you can support in a

nts show ing Sum mer Institutes participa ings draw the of one of back the on is what

concrete way, by gesturing, pointing to a detail in the image, etc. Depending on your students’ level of listening comprehension ability, you can use more complex language for your more advanced students.

To deliver the story using images like these, on pieces of paper, it is useful draw a timeline or some other visual image that suggests “moving through time” on the board (the one pictured here is a road, but you could use train tracks or a map, or any other format that you think is applicable to the details of your story) and tape the images to the timeline after you narrate them.

You can use the timeline to add extra information like dates, names of characters, locations, etc, as shown in this picture of me getting ready to add the paper images to this timeline.

As you speak about the images, you can use them to scaffold details about the plot. You can hold the papers in front of you and point to the images as you speak about them, as shown in this photo, before taping them to the timeline (blue or green painters’ tape is best for this as you will most likely need to pull the papers off the timeline to re-use them in another class.

As you can see in this photo of my “sad face,” you will also want to continue using other visual cueing to support students’ comprehension of the words you will be saying.

I am showing with my face, and also with the expression that I drew on the character in the picture, the words that I was saying in French: “I was very sad!”

Regardless of the mechanism you choose to deliver the story (drawing as you speak, using printed images or drawings on pieces of paper, or a prepared slideshow like the one in the sample lesson in this session), after you have narrated the entire story, you can go back and re-narrate the story all together to help students comprehend more than they did the first time.

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As you do so, it is recommended to point to the images and perhaps sketch some additional supports on the board near the images.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective, and hand out the Reading Workshop text if applicable. If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so today, since you will need this student in Session 19, the next session, to record the Video Retell. If you are just absolutely dead-set on not having a Videographer for some reason (in some schools or districts it would be against board policy to film in class), that’s your prerogative, of course, like everything about your teaching practice, but you will need to skip the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy that is used in the next session (Video Retells) and use another Scaffolded Oral Review strategy in its place.

This is fine, because - obviously - you are the boss of your classroom, and the boss knows best, but please be aware that this means you and your students will miss out on doing Video Retells, which are, for most classes, super-engaging. It also means that you will not have a collection of class videos to use in the end-ofthe-year “Film Festival” class project that is described in Session 47. That’s fine too; you can easily skip the Film Festival (or any of the end-of-the-year activities in Sessions 44-47), but just know that is the trade-off you are making if you choose not to have a Videographer this year. If I have convinced you to get a Videographer, which I hope I have, congratulations, and also please see the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and - I hope - with your Videographer), and begin the lesson.

French Beginner Readi

Find That Cognate In the sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase Two, shown here in French. The texts for this phase are “friendly” letters.

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ng

Again, since the Reading Workshop texts “pivot” to a new text type (letters, in this case), we are returning to the simplest, most familiar instructional strategy - Find That Cognate - to allow students some time to “settle in” to this phase and text type, if you are choosing to use our resources. Because this strategy was explained in detail in Session One, which you are advised to review if you need a refresher on how to do it, we will move on to the lesson procedures right away in this session.

Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the most comprehensible.

The lesson notes are written in English. Words that are said in the course language are in black text. The class’s stronger shared language is written in this color.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this letter to you in French, a personal letter to Grandpa on his 83rd birthday. Your job is to look for cognates - words that you just know because they are almost exactly like English.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, if you have set that job up, which I strongly suggest you do today, if you still have not done so. Then, read the text in the course language.

Once you have read the entire text, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘célébrerons’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, celebrate in English, is celebrate. C-E-L-E-B-R-A-T-E.” (Note: This sounds like: “Oui, célébrerons en anglais est celebrate. Célébrerons: sayyy-uhhh accent aiguelll-uhhh accent aigu-bayyy-etc. (saying letters in French).”)

(Asking a more open-ended question, if time permits:) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, passes in English, is pass, or spend like to “pass time” or “spend time”. P-A-S-S.” Repeat with a couple of other cognates. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Visual Story.

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It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Very quickly, you will want to move on to introduce the story briefly in English: “I will tell you a story from French literature. This story is very old, from the medieval times, 1405 to be precise, over 600 years ago, but it is a very important part of the history of women’s liberation from male dominance, otherwise known as the ‘patriarchy.’

In this book, Christine de Pizan, who was one of the rare women of those times who could read and write, imagines that she is reading a book - that really existed - by this dude who was basically saying that women are the source of all men’s problems. Christine gets upset by this, naturally, and she imagines that three supernatural women come to visit her and help her to build the “Cité des Dames” or the “City of Ladies,” where women who have lived amazing lives can all come together and get away from the shade the men were throwing around back then (and, seriously, still today, to a lesser degree).”

Project the first slide (or show or draw the first image) and use the visuals to narrate the story, saying one to two sentences per slide, as shown below.

Please take note that there are 16 slides, and Guided Oral Input is generally only about 10 minutes in length (or perhaps about 20 in a block class), so you will literally spend less than a minute on most of the slides, if you were to use these in class. For that reason, you will want to be very careful to SIMPLIFY what you plan to say, so that you can finish the story in the time allotted.

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After about 10 minutes of Guided Oral Input, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Continuing on with the lesson procedures, we move to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. For a detailed explanation of the “Finish My Sentence” strategy, see Session Five.

“Time for ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact in French, and then you will all speak in French as long as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point, but if not, point for me!”

“Number One (hold up one finger). Christine de Pizan was reading a book and…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “was sad,” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Six! Good job, a point for the class!”

(Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Number Two (hold up two fingers). Christine de Pizan felt sad because…”

(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

(Repeat, if time permits.)

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Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart As promised in earlier sessions, the training wheels are being lifted from my heavy-handed coaching, little by little, as you grow in confidence and skill. So, the Shared Writing is not written out in script format in this session, but rather provided below as a visual walkthrough. It gives an example of a possible Shared Writing session that could follow the lesson example above.

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As you read over the images, please pay special attention to the new anchor chart for this phase. The literacy focus is including inner thinking and dialogue in the narrative. The title I chose for my example anchor chart is “In Their Own Words,” but you can name it anything you like.

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions.

Continue in a similar vein, as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to narrate in the past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. Then, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Write Inside the Story Write Inside the Story is explained in more detail in Session Nine. Please see that session for a more detailed explanation of this strategy.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible.

“OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more details in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

(You might explain the activity in English and then repeat in the course language, as shown below.)

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We will write inside the text.

We will use the chart.

We will add to the text.

(You might model with a sentence or two, as shown below.)

Give students time to work on their writing, perhaps working with a partner.

You might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 19

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to retell a story about a character that the class made Intermediate: say sentence in French to retell a story about a character that the class made Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to retell a story about a character that the class made, giving details to describe the characters’ internal AND external traits and sensory details about the setting, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Class Story, using a One Word Image character that the class created as the main character.

During Cycle One Phase Three, if you followed the suggested instructional sequence, you built up a bank of two or three One Word Images. You will want to select one of the class’s characters prior to class as the “star” of the story you will create in this lesson. If your artists created a drawing on paper, you can use the artwork as a “costume” for your actors during the class story and the Video Retell today. a collection of One Word

Building up a bank of One Word Images and selecting the “star” of today’s story If you have not already developed two to four characters and artwork in the lesson(s) you taught using Session 11, you might want to cycle back to that session and spend a day or three making some additional One Word Images, so that you have a few from which you can formally select one that is well-loved and fun for the class as the star of your first class story.

Waiting until the class has several characters before starting your first story is an important point here. You want the first story to go swimmingly, and since characters and artwork are the foundation of the story’s success, you will want to have several characters to choose from, to maximize your chances of telling a whizbang story that captivates student interest and sets them up for engaging, creative fun.

A very important consideration is to choose the character for the first story with great care. You want a character that the class likes, one whose artwork is visually appealing, and who also (very importantly) lends itself to the creation of a strong problem to solve.

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The character you choose also MUST suggest a strong problem to solve in your story. You have asked the students at the end of the One Word Image process “Why is this X so Y?” (e.g. “Why is this burrito so happy?”) Often the problem will be to get them to stop being angry/sad, if they are experiencing a negative emotion. Conversely, if they are experiencing a positive emotion, the problem can be to take away or threaten the source of their happiness so that they have to, of course, go on a quest to save it or get it back.

If you did not already establish the reason(s) for the character’s emotion(s), you can do so today, speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, before launching into the story-creation process in the course language.

Make sure you and your students are ready for the challenge of story creation Another important consideration in choosing to move into story creation is your class’s readiness for this more open-ended process. The day you create your first story with your class is a day that will likely require more of you in terms of energy and goodwill than any other. There are a lot of moving pieces. For that reason, I strongly advise that you never force a storytelling day.

Unless you are feeling well-rested and eager, do not tackle the work of creating a story - the most energyintensive work that a comprehension-based language teacher can possibly do, and most likely some of the most energy-intensive work that anyone in your entire school building is doing, considering that you will be conducting a creative activity in a language that is new for your students.

So choose a day when you are in fine fettle and build your first story step by step as described in this instructional session. If you are not feeling ready, you can always, as previously explained, cycle back to any previous session. It might be a good idea to “park” on Session 11, to make a few more One Word Images, to “warm up” the class for this big undertaking, making their first story.

It is my hope that before arriving at this critical session, creating stories, you have really focused on classroom management, on your confidence, on your language delivery skills, and on getting to know your students. Creating stories with the class requires you to have a firm handle on your students’ attention, since it will require you to be slightly more creative and think on your feet just a little more. So, you will need to carefully evaluate your students’ readiness for story creation.

You might, as you reflect on your management, surmise that you need to “park” on some less-creative strategies, from the first eighteen sessions, and focus on your classroom management as you re-use strategies that are more familiar to you and your students, before moving on to this session.

Any more creative and open-ended strategy is generally, in any discipline, and with any teaching approach, more challenging to manage. But, take heart: it is not impossible! If you have set up solid expectations and reinforced them unfailingly as described in Chapter 4, Classroom Management, you will be ready, so don’t stress. You can become the kind of teacher who easily and happily engages their class in creative work together, and create stories that mean a lot to your classes, using their unique and (generally) super-fun characters, which is so rewarding, and generally one of the highlights of the year.

So, if you need to return to any of the previous sessions, which use more straightforward, easier-to-manage strategies, and “shore up” your management before moving into this session, please do so. It will pay off bigPage 347

time as you move forward, and any “lost” time will be repaid to you for the rest of the year, as you will be much better-prepared to lead your class through the rest of the sessions, which use strategies that increase in complexity and challenge throughout the year, as you grow your skills.

It is also my very sincere hope that by now you have reviewed some videos of yourself teaching so that you have a good mental representation of yourself as a language teacher and have had the chance to make adjustments to your delivery skills before moving on to the activities described in this session.

Further, you will need to set up your Videographer today, if you have not yet done so, before you move on to the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy of “Video Retell.” If you just cannot bring yourself to hire a Videographer, then you will just want to use a different Scaffolded Oral Review

a Video Retell of a class story

strategy: either one from a previous session in this book, or any other strategy - from any source

-

that allows you to review previous information by speaking, and perhaps using visual aids.

The daily instructional framework is designed to allow you to easily “sub out” various strategies in each part of the lesson — you can use many possible strategies for Reading Workshop, Guided Oral Input, Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment, just as long as they “fit” the purpose of that part of the framework. See the chart below for guidance on how to evaluate other strategies to see where they could possibly fit. Keep in mind that often a given strategy can “fit” within more than one lesson component, or can be slightly modified to fit.

This framework is designed to empower you with the decision-making tools to make sense of the myriad of instructional and assessment strategies that are out there, and even to accommodate strategies that you make up on your own, by giving you an organizational system to place any strategy within the daily instructional framework, and thus feel confident that you can catalogue the huge variety of engaging, effective strategies that are being developed by communication-based language teachers, and know where they fit into your daily plans and year-long plans (i.e. into which cycle and phase they fit best).

On the next page is a guide that may help you to use the daily instructional framework to categorize strategies that you encounter “in the wild” on blogs, at conferences, or in trainings.

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Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective.

If you have not yet set up your Videographer, I urge you to do so now, or at the latest before you move into Session 16, the first session in the Narration cycle (Cycle Two). See the HR Manual in the Appendices for more information on setting up this and other student jobs.

You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text.

Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and also I hope - a Videographer), and begin the lesson.

French Beginner Text

Write Inside the Story This strategy was explained in more detail in Session Nine, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy, and in Session 12, where it was first used for Reading Workshop. For more details, please review those sessions.

In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase Two. The texts for this phase are personal letters. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. To indicate the words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), I will use black text. The class’s stronger shared language is written in this color.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. We will use the “Write Inside the Story” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

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“I will read this personal letter to you in French, about a trip to Guatemala City during La Semana Santa, or “Holy Week,” the week of Easter, when people decorate the streets with colorful “rugs” made of colored sawdust. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write more details in the text about what the writer of this letter might have been thinking or feeling.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, and then read the text in the course language and discuss the images and information.)

“Would this person think (pointing to the anchor chart and writing in the course language)…it isn’t fair that people in Guatemala decorate the streets (using the text and images to establish meaning) or it isn’t fair that WE DON’T decorate the streets in Oregon?” (Students raise hands or call out.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “It isn’t fair that we don’t decorate the streets.

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat with one or two other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in, and then begin the class story.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

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Overview of the Story Creation Process A quick overview of the story creation process is provided here.

1: Review the Artwork (~2 min.)

2: Who (~2 min.)

3: Where (~2 min.)

4 (Optional): With Whom (~2 min.)

5: The Problem (~4 min.)

6: The Solution (~4 min.)

ying a cup of a teacher actor portraInstitutes in er mm coffee at Su Atlanta, 2018

Note: Even though the first three steps do not really get into the narrative/plot, I will model a first story creation lesson that stops after the Who and Where. More like a proto-story, but it’s enough to get your feet wet. You can use all six of the questions when you tell your next story, after you have gotten more solid on the first three. Since you will only be using three questions, you can thus spend more time on them than you would in a normal class, and so I suggest using the suggested times below: 1: Review the Artwork (~4 min.)

2: Who (~4 min.)

3: Where (~4 min.)

You can still create a perfectly satisfying little proto-story even with just these minimal details. You might add more plot details during Shared Writing, or perhaps return to finish the plot in a later lesson. That is perfectly fine; you could add onto the story in the next lesson, if it is engaging and you want to continue working with the character. In the second lesson, you would simply review the first three steps (or whatever you covered in the first lesson) and then move into the remaining steps.

I strongly recommend, if the story is not super-compelling, to just move on to a fresh story with another character in the second lesson, as there is no more disheartening feeling than trying to revive a deflated story the next day. Only in the rather rare case when a class is absolutely swept up in the story would I return to it again, rather than move on to a fresh beginning. As you get more confident in the story creation process, you will find that you move more quickly to the remaining parts of the story outline (i.e. With Whom, Problem, and Solution).

Student jobs to support story creation As this is your first class-created story, begin the process with some preliminary setup and hiring new student jobs, which is conducted in the stronger shared language.

You will need to hire for at least two, maybe three, new jobs, in addition to the artists you already hired to help in the one Word Image process. You may want to have your student HR team help you hire students for these jobs. The job descriptions and training manuals for the new jobs are found in the HR Manual in the Appendices.

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Videographer In order to do a Video Retell, you will definitely need to use your Videographer, and you will need to hire that student if you have not already done so. This student uses a video camera (I suggest a tablet or phone) to record the story. You might also have an Assistant to the Videographer, who counts down and gives the signal to begin filming, perhaps using a director’s clapboard and saying “Action!”

Story Driver I strongly urge you to also hire a Story Driver. The Story Driver is responsible for making sure that the story takes off and comes to a resolution within approximately 15 minutes by signaling to you when it is time to move to a new step in the questioning sequence outlined above. This job, which was taught to me by Ben Slavic, was transformative in how I managed the story creation process, which I used to allow to drag on more than I would like to admit. For me, my Story Driver is crucial for keeping stories light and entertaining and moving along at a good pace.

I like to provide the Story Driver with a piece of cardstock with the question sequence and approximate times, so they can follow along and signal if I get “stuck” on one part too long, as is very tempting to do when the class is engaged and the story is fun. Simply have the story driver to signal you when it is time to move to the next question on the list above, perhaps using their fingers to indicate the number in the sequence that you need to move on to.

I do not let the story driver time me with a timer, because that distracts them. I tell them that the ideal story driver can sense when we have spent the right amount of time on each level, and that the times listed are only guidelines. An ideal story driver just knows when we have spent enough time establishing the details of a certain level and does not let us linger there too long, so that the story gets boring or does not have time to conclude in one class period. Many classes don’t have students who are talented enough to do this job well, so, as with all the student jobs (as with jobs in real life), we don’t want to hire someone who can’t do the job.

Since you will probably only get through some of the story questions on the first day, you might want to make a “beginner” card for the story driver, with just these elements on it (notice again that the times are “stretched” to give you more time to play around with the question(s) for that step).

1: Review the Artwork (~4 min.)

2: Who (~4 min.)

3: Where (~4 min.)

Actors You will need one or two actors today. I highly recommend that you present this first story as an “audition” for possible permanent actors, not making any promises about who will be hired as the “official” actors until they have had a chance to ”prove” themselves and their ability to walk the fine line between hamming it up enough to be engaging and fun and “upstaging” you and thus distracting the class from the input.

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After you have chosen two students to be your actors today, leave them in their normal seats for now. I generally wait to call them up to the actors’ stools until I get to the “Where” question in the story sequence outlined above. This will happen naturally, and is explained in detail below, so don’t stress about it.

Artist(s) You will also need to train your artist(s) to do the two-panel story drawings, since they have, up until this point, only done drawings of the characters themselves. You will want to coach them that they need to divide the paper into two sections -- the top and the bottom. The top is for the “Problem” part of the story and the bottom is for the “Solution” part.

Here is an example of a two-panel illustration using a One Word Image from a first-year Spanish class.

To save time and keep up with the story illustration, your student artists will need to immediately start drawing the main character in the panels, before you begin the story, but they must be sure to leave space around the character for the details of the story which will emerge later. The artists must also be reminded to leave the character’s face empty, so that they can fill in the right emotions later. Instruct your artists not to put in dialogue or words about the story, just symbols, and maybe signs that indicate where the character is.

The Story Creation Process 1: Review the Artwork (~2 min.)

Holding the original illustration of the character, and speaking in the course language, point to the picture and review the already-known facts about the character: its “species,” (e.g. “This is a burrito” or “This is a bus.”) its color, its size, its emotions, the reason for its emotions, and any other facts that the class previously established when they created the character.

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2: Who (~2 min.)

Once you have reviewed the known facts about the character, add some more details. Here is where you decide, with the class, the character’s name and perhaps their job as well. There are many other details that you can establish during this time, of course, but name and job are key. You will develop the character beyond what you had when you started the story, which will add greatly to the direction the story takes. Character, more than plot, makes the really great stories.

Notice how in the panel demonstrating this, the teacher asks the question, and then gives a couple of examples of possible answers, to establish the meaning of the question (what its name is) and then repeats the question, so that students comprehend the question from context. You might use question word posters, or write the question words, or assign a gesture, but that is not really necessary. You can simply pose the question, give a couple of possible answers, and then repeat the question, waiting for students to offer ideas.

3: Where (~2 min.)

When asking where the character is, it is good to get a more and more specific location through your questioning. So if the class says that the character is in Spain, then find out that she is in Barcelona, and then find out that she is in a cathedral. And then find out that she is in the gift shop of the cathedral. Among the candles. Getting an increasingly more specific location does a lot to help shape the problem that the character will later experience. This process is modeled below. Again, notice how the teacher uses proper nouns (e.g.

Portland, California) to convey the meaning of the question “Where is he?” and then repeats the question once meaning has thus been established.

As stated above, character truly is more important than plot and location, but being very specific about location ("in the candle section of the gift shop of the cathedral in Barcelona in Spain") can also play a big role in bringing more interest and a better problem than just having the character be in the cathedral or worse, only in Barcelona or much worse, only in Spain. It expands the possibilities.

I like to write the location on the board, and perhaps add a simple sketch or word(s) in the class’s stronger shared language to reinforce the meaning, like a “sign” in the background, as shown in this image. This is the Page 355

point when it is generally most fruitful to call up the actor. You can do this quite simply, pointing to the first actor’s stool and saying, “This is the candle section of the gift shop.” Then gesture to the actor to go to the stool that now represents the candle section of the gift shop (or whatever location your class has decided on), to a round of applause from the class. You will not forget that you need an actor because once you have a location, you can’t really go forward in the story without one.

Once the actor is up, the real fun begins, as you can now start to use the actor to add levity to the story by asking them to portray emotions as they repeat the lines you will feed them, as modeled in the example below. I like to begin by having them look around at the setting and react to it, using the emotion that the class established for the character.

You: Class, Steve the Burrito looks (gesture) at the gift shop. He is happy (gesture).

(Look at your actor and gesture for them to look around the gift shop, with a happy expression of wonder on their face.You can add mirth to the proceedings by requiring Steve to look really happy, even if he was superhappy the first time.)

“No, no, Steve is REALLY happy (gesture)!” (Indicate to the actor to look happier.)

More mirth can be had by making your poor actor portray an EVEN happier reaction.).

“No, no, Steve is REALLY, REALLY HAPPY (gesture)!” (Indicate to the actor to look EVEN happier.)

Then I like to have the character simply describe themselves: their physical and personality traits, and their emotional state.

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Again, I use the “No, no, not like that” trick to coach the actor to provide repetitions of the language by having them portray their lines with more and more and more emoting.

You: Steve says (gesture), “I am a big, purple, rich burrito!”

Steve: I am a big burrito…

You (prompting the actor) …purple and rich.

Steve: purple and rich.

You: Steve says (gesture), “I am really happy (gesture)!”

Steve: I am really happy!

You: No, no, Steve is REALLY HAPPY (gesture). Steve says (gesture), “I am really happy (gesture)!” (modeling over-the-top happiness in your intonation, facial expression, and body language) Steve: I am REALLY happy!

Have the actor look at their surroundings and react to them emotionally as they state their feelings. Again, you can use the “No, no, not like that” trick to create more emotional engagement and repetitions.

You: Steve says (gesture), “I am in the candle section of the gift shop!”

Steve: I am in the…

You: (prompting the actor) …gift shop…

Steve: …gift shop…

You: (prompting the actor) …the candle section of the gift shop at the cathedral!

Steve: …the candle section of the gift shop at the cathedral!

You: Steve says (gesture), “I am in the candle section of the cathedral gift shop!”

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Steve: I am in the candle section of the cathedral gift shop!

You: Steve loves (gesture) candles! Steve says (gesture), “I love (gesture) candles!”

Steve: I love candles!

You: No, no, Steve says (gesture) “I love (gesture) candles!” with ENTHUSIASM (gesture)! He is really happy (gesture)!

Steve: I LOVE CANDLES!

The above questioning sequence demonstrates how much input and engagement is found in the call and response nature of the questioning, and your coaching of the actor to greater and greater heights of dramatic performance.

You might be thinking, “Wait, I just don’t have it in me to be that dramatic in class every time I tell a story or use an actor.” That is normal; even the most dramatic, intense teachers cannot possibly sustain the level of energy required to be this dramatic every day.

You can rest assured that the first few classes in which you train your actors are the most energy-intensive for you. After you have modeled and trained your actors in the kind of over-the-top melodrama that you expect, you can begin to “fade into the background” and simply feed your trained actors their lines, in a calmer and less dramatic way, as you continue to exhort them, from the sidelines and in a calmer way, to display more and more emotion.

This is why trained, “permanent” actors are so important; once they know how to portray the information in a dramatic way, you will want to use them again and again, so that you can relax and move into this “acting coach” role, instead of having to be the source of the drama and fun.

The actor repeating what the instructor says above brings levity to classes, and this call and response process is truly something to experience. Just have the actor repeat after you, with heightened emotion, as in the above example and you will suddenly feel the afterburners in the rocket beneath you shake the rocket with power as your story blasts off to parts which, for most teachers, were heretofore unknown in previous attempts with story creation.

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It is suggested that you stop here in your first storytelling day. But, if time permits (especially in a block class), you can continue on to the “plot development” as explained below. And, in your next story, you will want to challenge yourself (with the help of your Story Driver) to include the whole sequence of questions, so that you move on to telling more narrative-like stories.

Please bear in mind that question four (with whom) is always optional. I suggest that you omit the second character if you do not feel confident in using the other five questions (Review Artwork, Who, Where, Problem, Solution) then you skip it until you can confidently spin a simple story with just one character and actor, and then add in a second character in later stories. Of course, having two characters greatly increases the opportunities to get in repetitions of the language, and especially first- and second-person verbs, so you are advised to try using Step Four as soon as you feel ready.

4 (Optional): With Whom (~2 min.)

Sometimes it is fun to have two characters in the same story together. Other times it is fun to give them a new character to be with. I used to use a lot of celebrities as characters in my stories. However, in the interest of the inclusion and comfort of all students, I now rarely use celebrities, preferring to stick to the realm of imagination and make-believe. That way, we don’t end up using celebrities that some students don’t know, or that offend some students’ or families’ moral convictions. We also avoid the death trap of politics, which just keeps getting more and more dicey.

The character that joins the story can be friend or foe to the main character. You can make the second character the same “species” as the main character (e.g. another burrito) or a different species (e.g. a taco).

Sometimes you will want the second character to be a human, most likely someone with designs on using the character for its natural purpose (e.g. eating the burrito, putting trash in the trash can, or mailing the envelope). Sometimes the second character can be a person from class. It can be really fun if the second character is another character from the same class, or maybe even a different class’s character that your class is interested in because they see it hanging in the other class’s art gallery.

To introduce the second character, I do not ask “Who is there with Steve?” or another question that can leave my students sitting there looking at me, as I feel uneasy, waiting for them to come up with some creative idea, or - with some less-than-creatively-engaged classes - any idea at all. I simply say, “Another burrito looks at Steve!” or “Another burrito says, ‘Hello, Steve!’” or “A person looks at Steve!” or “A person says, ‘Hello, Steve!’”

In French, the verb arrive is a direct, easy cognate with the English “arrives” and so I find that in French I rely on that word a lot to introduce the second character, saying, “A person arrives in the gift shop” or “Another Page 359

burrito arrives in the gift shop.” However, this is not the case in every language combination. In that case, you can just state an action that the person or the other burrito/envelope/shoe does, to introduce them without having to resort to speaking in the class’s stronger shared language and interrupting the story-creation process. Another easy option is to signal silently to the second actor, using a predetermined “come to the stool” signal and then simply say, speaking in your course language, “Look, class! Another burrito!” or even, “Look, class! TWO burritos! One…Steve…and two (point to the new actor)!”

If you do have a second character here, bring up a second actor, to a round of applause, have them sit on the second stool, and establish its name.

Now, you can engage the two actors in dialogue. This provides a MAJOR boost in engagement and fun, so you are encouraged, when you feel that you are ready and your class can handle the excitement, to start using two actors in your stories.

You: Betty the Burrito says (gesture), “Hey Steve, my name is Betty.”

Betty: Hey Steve, my name is Betty.

You: Steve says (gesture), “Hi Betty, I’m Steve.”

Steve: Hi Betty, I’m Steve.

You: Steve says (gesture), “Betty, I love (gesture) candles!”

Steve: Betty, I love candles!

You: Betty says (gesture), “I don’t. I am scared (gesture) of fire.”

(If needed, establish the meaning of “scared” and “fire”. Most likely you will write it on the board , perhaps with a translation. You might also assign gestures to the words and cycle through the new gestures along with a few already-established ones.)

Betty: I don’t. I am scared of fire.

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Here, you can work with the second actor to have the portray their emotion with more and more dramatic flair.

You: No, no, Betty is scared (gesture)! She says (gesture), “I don’t. I am scared (gesture) of fire” with FEAR (gesture)!

Betty: I don’t. I am scared of fire.”

5: The Problem (4-6 min.)

The problem is the central element of storytelling. This is why you are advised to only select characters that already have a good problem to work with, based on either the reason for their negative emotions or in taking away the reason for their positive emotions, as explained above. I never want to get to this point without a good prior idea of what the problem might be. I don’t really want to ask the class, “So, y’all, what is the problem here?” because that leaves this super-important part of the story up to chance, and that makes me feel nervous, which greatly diminishes my ability to lead the creation of the story with my thinking faculties intact. Or as intact as they can be, what with how busy the school day is!

Note that sometimes as you work with the class in creating the story, you will find that your original idea for the problem is not as engaging as a new idea that comes up naturally in the process. So I am always open to the possibility of a better problem arising during the story creation process. But if you do not have any new ideas, then you need a strong problem to fall back on. To introduce the problem, I generally just say, “Class, there is a problem!” and state the problem in a dramatic fashion. Then you will want to return to having the actors provide more dialogue. This part can get really fun.

You: Oh no, class, there is a problem! Betty is scared of fire and Steve lights a candle!

(Establish the meaning of “lights”, most likely by writing it on the board in L1 and L2 and perhaps also assigning it a gesture and cycling through some gestures including the new word) (Make Steve pantomime lighting a candle) You: Steve lights a candle (gesture or point to the word(s) and Betty is scared (gesture).

(Make Betty pantomime being scared.)

You: Betty looks (gesture) at Steve.

(Make Betty look at Steve with a look of fear.)

You: Betty looks (gesture) at the candle.

(Make Betty look at the candle with a look of more fear.)

You: Betty looks (gesture) at the fire!

(Make Betty look at the fire with a look of even more fear.)

You: Betty says (gesture), “Oh no Steve, I am scared (gesture)! Fire!”

Betty: Oh no Steve! I am scared! Fire!

You: Betty yells (gesture), “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Betty: Fire! Fire! Fire!

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You can go on from here with more dialogue, of course. This is a great moment to have the actors really ham it up and “milk” the moment for all its dramatic potential.

You can see that the problem does not have to be complicated. In fact, simple problems are best not just in these first few stories or the year, but throughout levels one and two. It is in the interaction with the actors, and the fact that the class has created the character, that the interest in generated. A too-complex story quickly becomes unwieldy, with too many words on the board.

Using lots of dialogue with your actors, as modeled here, puts the brakes on any tendency to create a runaway story that needs too many new words. Peppering your board with a bunch of new words runs the risk of losing kids, so keep the story simple, slow down and that will generate and maintain student comprehension, without which it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain their engagement.

Your actors are your best friends in the story creation process. Cherish them. Use them to their full potential.

They put the brakes on your story train while adding a lot, by the way they speak when they repeat after you, to the fun.

6: The Solution (4-6 min.)

When I taught a Creative Writing elective, and in my English Language Arts units on Realistic and Imaginative Fiction, I found that there are three surefire ways to coach student writers to solve a problem in a narrative.

They work very well in language class, too.

One: Bring in a new character.

Two: Send the character to a new place.

Three: Bring in both a new character and a new place.

You will need to rely on your intuition in the moment here. It will be OK no matter what you choose. Don’t get performance anxiety over this work. It is just a silly story you are creating with the kids so that they have something to write about later in class. Promise! Just go with what feels natural.

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Either tell the students that a new person arrives (you might need to establish the meaning of “arrives”) or that the character(s) leaves (you might need to establish the meaning of “leaves”). Ask who arrives or where they go and, if time permits and you feel confident in establishing meaning, you can also ask how they are traveling.

In the new location, or upon the arrival of the new person, of course you will - time permitting - have your actors portray emotions through thinking aloud and facial expressions/posture, action, and dialogue.

To solve the problem, it is perfectly acceptable to simply go for the obvious, simple ending. This is not high art. Taking the example of Steve and Betty, perhaps it is windy and the candle goes out and Betty is happy.

Perhaps a nun comes to the gift shop and says, “No fire in the gift shop!” and blows out the candle. Perhaps a therapist comes in and helps Betty get over her phobia. Perhaps Steve catches fire and flies out of the cathedral with some flying (burrito) brothers.

Anything could happen. It doesn’t matter. Truly, it matters not at all! Honestly, your average kids are not literary critics. They are usually just happy to have a class that is quiet and focused and where the content isn’t all about memorizing, and provides at least some degree of kid-friendly interest in their school days.

Plus, if they don’t like your super-simple stories, then they can get cracking to suggest better ideas!

Why do they expect YOU to be the funny one?

You’re OLD!

On the next pages, you will find “comics” of this story so you can easily refer to the entire process at a glance.

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Video Retell Video Retells review the entirety of the just-created story without interruption. The actors - and maybe some “extras” from the rest of the class - recreate the action on camera while you simply narrate the story from off-camera. You can add in props, other actors, sound effects (having students provide them), perhaps adding in a bit more dialogue, whatever strikes you in the moment.

Prepping for a Video Retell with Sum Institutes participants in Atlanta, mer GA

I have had classes who take the video production very seriously, and make adorable videos of our stories and other information from Guided Oral Input. If you have students who like set design, and in some classes you will, they could be labeled the Set Crew and could quickly scurry off to a corner of the classroom at this point to make props. In the example of the candle story in Spain, they might draw a sign to put up on the wall that says "Candle Section" or just simply draw the candles and prop the drawing up next to the actor, all in a few minutes.

You will want to encourage them to work fast. If they dilly-dally, it is not Notice the “set design”

worth it; if they cannot complete their work fast, you will want to change to a new Set Crew, or simply drop this completely optional student job.

Two or three kids, or even more, if the story calls for it, might be enlisted to serve as “extras’ in the Video Retell, or provide sound effects at specific times (e.g. “When I point to you, knock on your desk to make the sound of the candle knocking on the gift shop counter.”).

This is a good way to engage those students who need to move their bodies all the time, if you happen to have any students like that. Which you do. I’ve never met your students, but I’ve met enough of mine to know: you do.

If you upload the videos to your Google Classroom or a similar site, they can be used at any time to provide review and additional input. They are particularly well-suited to making sub plans. You can simply have your students watch videos of previous stories - or even, for classes who can comprehend at a higher level, watch other classes’ stories - and summarize in English to demonstrate their understanding. You can grade these retells using the Narration Retell Rubric that aligns to this phase, found in the Appendices.

It’s nice to be able to pull a grade for the grade book when you aren’t even in class, and the sub may not even speak your language, as is such a common problem for language teachers.

The video retell also gives your artists more time to complete the second panel of the drawing, which is the “Solution” panel. Generally the artists will need additional time to do this since the “solution” part of the story process goes by rather fast, with a good deal of action.

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By the end of the Guided Oral Input, my hope is that the artists have completed their work, so I can reveal it to the class after the video retell, for more Scaffolded Oral Review, and also refer back to it during Shared Writing, to help recall details of the setting, plot, or characters.

Remember to keep the artwork turned away from the class until the moment for the big reveal arrives, in the next class session; this creates some suspense due to students’ curiosity to see how the artists are portraying the new information created that day.

Generally a 10 to 12 minute story can be retold as a video retell in about 4 minutes. A nice collection of retells provides all kinds of good material for their end-of-the-year film festival, discussed later in this book. For now, simply collecting as many video retells as possible is the goal, to set yourself up with a nice collection of videos for later use. It is like putting gold in the bank, and earning interest all year!

Have your Videographer begin a new video file, and tell them that they have artistic license to move closer, zoom in, whatever they think would make the video more appealing and dramatic. You can tell the class that you want them to provide sound effects, perhaps teaching them hand signals that you will give during the Video Retell for “ooh” and

Atlanta’s Got Talent!

“aah” (or other expressions of surprise and wonderment such as “How wonderful!” or “How cute!” or “Amazing!” in your course language) or gasps of dismay (or expressions of disgust, sympathy, or disappointment such as “Too bad!” or “That’s awful!”) or “yay” and applause (or other expressions of delight, such as “Great news!” or “That’s so awesome!”).

Inform the class that this video will become part of the class’s End-of-the-Year Film Festival, in which you will eat popcorn on one or two of the last days of the school year, and watch the greatest hits of the year, so they should maintain “quiet on the set” so that the video is of high quality.Then, simply stand off to the side, providing the voiceover narration and not appearing in the video, and quickly retell the story, prompting the actors with their lines as you would during the story creation process.

Write and Discuss with an Anchor Chart You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 18, adding one or two new terms to it today.

See the images below for a visual walkthrough of a possible Shared Writing session that could follow from the example story given above. For more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes, please see Session Nine.

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Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to add thinking or dialogue comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. Then, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

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Everyone Acts This strategy was first introduced in Session 15, wherein you can find a detailed explanation of it. More information on “Everyone Acts” can also be found in Session 17.

Everyone Acts is especially fun and engaging as the Student Application and Assessment at the end of a lesson in which you have used the Scaffolded Oral Review strategy of Video Retells. However, it can be used at the end of any lesson, regardless of the specific combination of strategies that you have chosen for the preceding components of the daily instructional framework.

If you have used the Video Retell strategy in this lesson, as described above, you will find that you are mostly simply recreating the dialogue that took place between the actors in the Guided Oral Input (the Class Story) and the Scaffolded Oral Review (Video Retell), which makes this Student Application and Assessment strategy (Everyone Acts) even more engaging and accessible for students.

The activity might go something like this, after the example lesson provided in this session: “You will get with a partner, and decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will be Steve, and Partner B will be Betty. I will say your lines in French with gestures and emotions, and then the partner who has that role will repeat the line with gestures and emotions, then Partner A will do the same, taking turns to create a little scene in French.”

“Partner A, Steve, (point to the word(s)), says (gesture), “I’m Steve the Burrito! I’m purple and rich!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language, “I am Steve the Burrito! I’m purple and rich!”)

You can use the “No, No, Not Like That!” trick, and simply restate the actors’ line, insisting that the actor say it with MORE emotion, as modeled below.

“No, no, Steve is VERY HAPPY (gesture or use your posture and/or facial expression to establish meaning).

Steve says (say the line very dramatically and gesture very dramatically), “I am Steve the Burrito and I am purple and RICHHHHH!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language and, it is to be hoped, in a more dramatic fashion , “I am Steve the Burrito! I’m purple and rich!!!”)

Continue on to Partner B, modeling a line for them that Betty said (or could have said) in the story, and perhaps return again to Partner A and, time permitting, cycling through another set of lines with both partners.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 20

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say words or phrases in French to retell a story from a French-speaking culture (in this example lesson, medieval France) using. the characters’ own voices to say what they would have thought or said Intermediate: say sentences in French to retell a story from a French-speaking culture, using the characters’ own voices to say what they would have thought or said Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to retell a story from a French-speaking culture, using the characters’ own voices to say what they would have thought or said, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: In this session, we return to the Guided Oral Input strategy of Visual Stories. This versatile strategy can be used to narrate any story, with visual support for comprehension. You can either draw the information as you teach, or you can use a prepared series of images, such as a slideshow, to present information to students step by step as the story unfolds. Both options are described at great length in Session 18, where this strategy was first introduced. For a refresher on how to prepare various formats of Visual Stories, please refer to Session 18.

If you choose to draw in front of your class to tell the story, then, in order to prepare for Session 21, in which you will use the Thought Bubble Review strategy for Guided Oral Input to review and extend on this story, you might want to take pictures or screenshots of the finished story on the board or paper. You will then be able to use the images from the stories you tell in this session, to retell them in the lessons in the next session, adding the thought and speech bubbles to the screenshots (explained in the next session).

The example lesson in this session uses the Visual Story from Cycle Two Phase Three of our curriculum materials, a medieval tale from the French text Le Roman de Renart (The Novel of Renart), a collection of trickster tales about a wily fox named Renart. This episode is “Renart and Ysengrin’s Hams”. You can find this and other Visual Stories from a variety of cultures, in various languages, in our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or refer to Session 18 for guidance on how to prepare your own Visual Story using any culturally-significant tale.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective.

Distribute or project the text. Then, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

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Find That Cognate In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase Three, shown here in French.

The

texts for this phase are recipes from various French-speaking cultures. You can find a leveled collection of these texts in French and various other

French Beginner Readi

ng

languages on our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or, as always, you can make, adapt, or find culturally-authentic texts, or simply project. a Shared Writing text from a previous session.

See below for examples of texts in Italian, Spanish, and English.

French Intermediate Reading

French Advanced Reading

As we have done at the start of each new phase of the yearly framework, because the Reading Workshop texts “pivot” to a new text type (recipes, in this case), we are returning to the simplest, most familiar Reading Workshop instructional strategy Find That Cognate - to allow students some

English Beginner Reading

Italian Beginner Reading

German Beginner Reading

time to “settle in” to this phase and text type, if you are choosing to use our resources. Because this strategy was explained in detail in Session One, we will move on to the lesson procedures right away in this session. For more details on this strategy, see page Session One. As is the case throughout the book, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black.

The class’s stronger shared language is grey. Hand out or project the text, briefly preview the topic, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language, as modeled below.

“I will read this recipe to you in French, for French onion soup, which in French is simply “onion soup”. Your job is to look for cognates - words that you just know because they are almost exactly like English.”

(Give the signal to start class and begin filming. Read the text in the course language. Then, point to or circle a very obvious cognate and ask for its meaning in the class’s stronger shared language.)

“Class, ‘griller’ in English?”

(Students answer. Then you write the English on the text, and spell it, saying the letters in the course Page 371

language, as demonstrated below.)

“Yes, grill in English, is grill. G-R-I-L-L.” (Note: This sounds like: “Oui, griller en anglais est grill. Griller: jayyy-errrr-eyyy-etc.”)

(Asking a more open-ended question, if time permits:) “Class, look (gesture). Other (gesture) cognates?”

(Students answer, probably in English.)

“Yes, ingredients in English, is ingredients. I-N-G-R-E-D-I-E-N-T-S.” Repeat with a couple of other cognates, time permitting. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Visual Story.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

Display the slideshow, and briefly introduce the story: “This is a story from France, during the medieval period, about a trickster. Trickster tales are a common type of traditional folk story, and they are usually about a ‘trickster,’ which is to say, a clever character who plays tricks on others. This story is about a trickster fox named Renart. Renart was a very popular character in the Middle Ages.”

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The lesson procedures are provided below, in graphic format. For a more detailed explanation of Visual Stories, including how to tell a story by simply sketching on the board, please see Session 18, where various ways to prepare and narrate Visual Stories are described extensively.

After about 10 to 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input, even if you did not discuss every part of the story in detail, or you had to give a brief summary of the ending in the class’s stronger shared language, you will move on to a Video Retell (or another Scaffolded Oral Review strategy, if you have no Videographer.

Video Retell Video Retells can be used, as they were in Session 19, in which you can review a detailed explanation, to reenact a story in which you used actors during the Guided Oral Input portion of the lesson, or, as in this case, they can be used to retell a story that you told without actors during the Guided Oral Input.

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A note on substitutions: Because of the “modular” nature of the daily instructional framework and the yearlong curricular framework, you might choose not to use a Videographer, and so you might not want to use this particular Scaffolded Oral Review strategy. This is perfectly fine, and indeed it is one of the strengths of the Stepping Stones curricular framework: the modular, “Lego® -like” design of the interlocking lesson components and the open-ended nature of the instructional cycles and phases.

These modular “building blocks” or “stepping stones” are designed for maximum flexibility as regards your selection of strategy and content, while also providing a strong structure. It’s like building with Legos® in that way: you can choose to follow the instructions exactly, and see the designer’s vision take shape exactly as written, or you can choose to substitute a blue brick for a red one, as long as it is the right size.

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And, also like building with Legos® , you will find that, after you follow the directions exactly as written, developing your skills and learning through experience how to “think like a designer,” you will begin to understand better and better what the various types of blocks in the Lego® system can be used for, and you will find. your imagination and creativity suggesting minor tweaks and customizations as you build, and eventually you can build your own creations from “scratch.” In a similar process of growth, as you “play” with the various “blocks” in Stepping Stones, you will almost certainly begin to see other possibilities for how to substitute, rearrange, and build lessons from “scratch” that fit into the daily instructional framework and the yearlong curricular framework.

You might, for instance, choose a different text for Reading Workshop, but still use a recipe. In the example here, the teacher has chosen. to use a recipe for apple pie instead of the example of French onion soup.

Or, you might use a different recipe and also switch out the Reading Workshop strategy, because you like it better, or you are more familiar with it, or your students seem to enjoy it more, or it fits better with the text you have chosen, or just because you get a wild hair or feel tired of Tina telling you what to do all the time.

Depending on your level of confidence, or what you want or need to teach, you might substitute more components of the daily instructional framework - strategies and/or content. Notice that in the example below, the teacher has chosen to design a Card Talk or Slide Talk that asks students to submit their favorite fairy tale.

This is because this lesson is in Cycle Two, Phase Two, Narrating Cultural Stories. While you can substitute Page 375

strategies and content as much as you want or need to, you are strongly encouraged to align any content you substitute with the focus of the cycle and phase you are working through.

This way, you will experience another of the great benefits of the Stepping Stones yearlong curricular framework: the momentum it builds as it moves through the cycles (Description, Narration, Information, Opinion, and Argument) and “pivots” within the cycles (e.g. from personal stories to imaginative stories, and now, in this phase, on to cultural tales). So, in the image below, note that the Slide Talk on favorite fairy tales fits with the current phase.

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For the Video Retell, first have your Videographer begin a new video file, and remind them that they have artistic license to move closer, zoom in, whatever they think would make the video more appealing and dramatic. Much more detail and several other ideas for spicing up the action are found in Session 18, so you might refer back to that section if you want to include more “audience engagement” in the video. Remind the class that this video will become part of the class’s End-of-the-Year Film Festival, in which you will eat popcorn on one or two of the last days of the school year, and watch the greatest hits of the year, so they should maintain “quiet on the set” so that the video is of high quality.

Then, simply stand off to the side, so that you are providing the voiceover narration and not appearing in the video, and quickly retell the story, prompting the actors with their lines as demonstrated in Session 19.

No “Star Wars” Beginnings!

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing.

You will set up a new anchor chart called “No Star Wars Beginnings.” This means beginning our stories right in the middle of the action, without a bunch of exposition. For example, avoiding this “Star Wars” type beginning: “This is a burrito. He lives in France. His name is Ted McTaco.”) and jumping into the action with talking, thinking, or action, perhaps like this: “BANG! Ted McTaco dropped his sandwich and yelled, ‘I’M FED UP!’”

Below, you will find a graphic demonstration a way Write and Discuss might go in this example lesson.

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Continue Shared Writing as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to narrate in the past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. Then, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Everyone Acts This strategy was first introduced in Session 15, and you can find a detailed explanation of it therein. Further information on “Everyone Acts” can also be found in Sessions 17 and 18.

The activity might go something like this, after the example lesson provided in this session:

“You will get with a partner, and decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will be Renart, and Partner B will be Ysengrin. I will say your lines in French with gestures and emotions, and then the partner who has that role will repeat the line with gestures and emotions, then Partner A will do the same, taking turns to create a little scene in French.”

“Partner A, Renart, (point to the word(s)), says (gesture), “I am hungry! (gesture) I want (gesture) ham!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language, “I am hungry! I want ham!”) (continuing to work with Partner A) “Renart, (point to the word(s)), says (gesture), “Ysengrin has FOUR (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) hams! It’s no fair (gesture)!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language, “Ysengrin has FOUR big hams! It’s no fair!”

You can use the “No, No, Not Like That!” trick, and simply restate the actors’ line, insisting that the actor say it with MORE emotion, as modeled below.

“No, no, Renart is VERY HUNGRY (gesture or use your posture and/or facial expression to establish meaning). Steve says (say the line very dramatically and gesture very dramatically), “Ysengrin has Page 379

FOUUUUUUUR (hold up four fingers) BIIIIIIIIIIG (gesture) FAAAAAAAAAAT (gesture) DELLLLLLLICIOUS (gesture) hams! It’s noooooooooo fair (gesture)!” (the students who are Partner A repeat to their partner, speaking in the course language and, it is to be hoped, in a more dramatic fashion , Ysengrin has FOUR big hams! It’s no fair!”)

Continue on to Partner B, modeling a line for them that Yesengrin said (or could have said) in the story, and perhaps return again to Partner A and, time permitting, cycling through another set of lines with both partners.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 21

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write phrases or sentences in French to retell a story we studied on (day) and say what the characters thought or said, or what they were feeling.

Intermediate: say sentences in French to retell a story we studied on (day) and say what the characters thought or said, or what they were feeling Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to retell a story we studied on (day) and say what the characters thought or said, or what they were feeling, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: To prepare for Session 22, you will want to ask students to submit pictures to the class slideshow (if you choose to do Slide Talk) or think about three or four sketches they can draw on a card for the first lesson in Cycle Four (for Card Talk). You might set aside time at the end of a lesson in this session, Session 21, for students to brainstorm and/or submit/draw their images. In order to choose the topic of the pictures, you will need to decide on the topic of your Information cycle.

The example lessons will use the topic of “Regions of France,” but you can, of course, choose to address any other informational topic in Cycle Four. You are advised to read the introductory section of Session 22 before you assign this task to students, so you can “angle” the pictures to elicit students’ prior knowledge of the topic you will address.

The Thought Bubble Review uses “thought bubbles” or “speech bubbles” to provide a review of a story that you told previously in class. This lesson will use the example from Session 20, the story of Renart. See Session 20 for the first lesson example that serves as the foundation for this review lesson.

The example lesson uses digital thought bubbles, but you can also make them on paper. You might simply take a stack of brightly-colored Post-It notes and, prior to class, write 8-12 thoughts or speech that a character in your story could have said or thought at various points in the plot. You might want to use one color of notes for thoughts and a different color for speech. You could draw thought bubbles and speech bubbles around the words, and write the sentence in the course language, in dark marker. I like the Post-it notes that are 3 x 5 inches, lined, and neon colored like the ones in the picture.

You can also prepare the thought/speech bubbles on paper and use tape to affix them to the story. To make the preparation of these paper cards easier, you can draw a thinking bubble and a speech bubble in thick, dark marker on a sheet of plain copy paper, and then run off a good supply of them on the copy machine, perhaps using bright-colored paper, and then cut (or have a student worker cut) around the marker, so that the bubbles have a thick, dark outline and room to write inside. (Teacher tip: I have wasted a bunch of time Page 381

cutting things like this one by one. It took me a few years in the education field to wise up and start cutting four or five sheets of paper at once. Word to the wise. A good, sharp, sturdy pair of scissors is a great investment in your efficiency as an educator. I have lived and learned. My pain, your gain, I guess.)

These thoughts/dialogue can be utterances that you included in the original telling of the story, or the other activities that followed it in the lesson when you first told it, but it is more likely that they will be novel utterances that recycle some of the language used in the first lesson, and add thoughts/dialogue to express the character(s)’ reaction to the events.

Then, to teach the lesson, you will use the same format that you used to tell the story in the first lesson. If you drew as you told the story, you can either project the screenshots or pictures of the drawings (if you saved these at the end of the lesson) or you can re-draw the story to review the key points. If you used a slideshow or other prepared images, you can project then again and use them to briefly summarize the story. After you have retold the key plot points, you will use through the stack of thoughts and dialogue and tell the story again, asking students to indicate when they see a place in the plot where a character might have said or thought these things.

It is super-fun to use informal language in the bubbles that is just a tiny bit “snarky” that you think your students would enjoy learning, like however your language would express sentiments like “I don’t care!” or “Stop hassling me!” or “What a pain!” Mild curse words would be fun here, too, but maybe not the most school-appropriate choice. Depends on your school culture, I suppose. Myself, I am not quite that brave.

After all the bubbles have been “played,” you might, if time permits, retell the story with the bubbles in it, so that students can hear the story with the thinking and dialogue without all the interruptions to play the words.

In your Shared Writing, you can incorporate some of the language that you added to the chart, to model the use of dialogue and inner thinking in narrative writing. Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc., and share the lesson objective. Distribute or project the text for Reading Workshop. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

French Beginner Text

Write Inside the Story This strategy is explained in more detail in Session Nine, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy, and in Session 12, where it was first used for Reading Workshop.

In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Two Phase Three.

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The texts for this phase are recipes. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this recipe to you in French, for sugared crêpes. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write more details about what the writer of this recipe might have thought or felt.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, and then read the text aloud.)

“Would this person think (pointing to the anchor chart and writing in the course language)… yum, I love crêpes (using the text and images to establish meaning) or yum, I love pizza?”

(Students raise hands or call out.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “I thought, ‘YUM, I love crêpes!’.”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat, using one or two more term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five. The lesson procedures are provided below, in graphic format.

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After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, even if you have not been able to use all the thought/ speech bubbles, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Who Said What?

Move to your Review Spot. This Scaffolded Oral Review strategy was first introduced in Session 19. It asks students to imagine what someone would say or think in reaction to various situations that are related to the facts you discussed during Guided Oral Input.

You will make a series of three to five statements that a member of the class may have said, based on what you learned in the survey, and ask who said, or would have said, each one.

“Time for a review quiz. This is called “Who Said What?” I will pretend to be someone in class, and say something. Your job is to say who might say that. You will hear the answer twice. The first time, listen, don’t talk. The second time, say the person who would have said this.” (explaining the directions again in the course language) “I will say (gesture)…Say (gesture) means say. Show me “say” (gesture). Show me “look” (gesture). “Prefer” (gesture). “Love” (gesture). “Talk” (gesture). “Like” (gesture). “Say” (gesture).”

“Number One. (hold up one finger). Who would have said (gesture) ‘It’s not fair (gesture) that Ysengrin has four (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) delicious (gesture) hams and I have none (hold up a zero sign with your hand)…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) ‘It’s not fair (gesture) that Ysengrin has four (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) delicious (gesture) hams and I have none (hold up a zero sign with your hand)!’?”

Students call out: Renart! Renart would have said! etc.

“Yes, Renart would have said (gesture) ‘It’s not fair (gesture) that Ysengrin has four (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) delicious (gesture) hams and I have none (hold up a zero sign with your hand)!

“Would Ysengrin say (gesture) ‘It’s not fair (gesture) that RENART has four (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) delicious (gesture) hams and I have none (hold up a zero sign with your hand)!

Students call out: No! Yes! Ysengrin would have said! etc. (since there was sone debate as to whether or not Ysengrin would, in fact, have said this) Would Ysengrin say (gesture) ‘It’s not fair (gesture) that RENART has four (hold up four fingers) big (gesture) delicious (gesture) hams and I have none (hold up a zero sign with your hand)!’ at the beginning (show a slide from the Guided Oral Input) or at the end (show a slide from the Guided Oral Input)?”

Students call out: End! At the end! etc.

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“Number Two. (hold up two fingers). Who would have said (gesture) in kindergarten (point to the image/word) ‘I am curious (point)!’…shhh! Who would have said (gesture) in kindergarten (point to the image/word) ‘I am curious (point)’?”

Students call out the answer, and you might ask follow-up questions as modeled above.

Ask more questions, if time permits.

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in the lessons in Session 20, adding a couple of new terms to it today. See the lesson outline below in graphic format.

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Continue as time permits, accumulating points in the goal box as you go. If another word to narrate in the past comes up naturally as you write, and you think it is important to remember and use in the future, you can add it to the Anchor Chart. Then, move on to Shared Reading.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Who Said What?

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the thought bubbles visible. You could also hand out copies of the thought bubbles for students to refer to.

“Time for a review quiz: “Who Said What?” I will pretend to be someone in class, and say something. Your job is to write a sentence to say who said what. You will hear each one twice. Here’s an example.”

“Class, who said, ‘I’m so hungry?’ Renart or Ysengrin? Who said, ‘I’m so hungry?’ Renart or Ysengrin?” (model writing the answer, perhaps having students copy it as the first line of the quiz) “Renart said, ‘I’m so hungry.’”

Continue on to ask a few more questions, giving plenty of time for students to write.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 22

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write phrases or sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France Intermediate: write a series of sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France Advanced: write a series of connected sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France, and using transition words to organize the information

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is Academic Card/Slide Talk. This is a content-based variation on the familiar strategy of Card/Slide Talk. The only difference is that you will ask students to submit/ sketch images that reveal their prior knowledge, and perhaps bring to light any misconceptions, stereotypes, or other erroneous conclusions that they may have in their minds.

The question that I like to use, and which will be modeled in this example lesson, on Regions of France, is “What comes to mind when you think about X?” In this case, the question is “What do you envision when you think about France?” and students are asked to submit three pictures of what springs to mind about France.

Of course, many students will submit the same typical images: the Eiffel Tower, cafés, mimes, bérets, etc.

Sometimes teachers can get discouraged because the images their students submit reveal very “lazy” or “surface-level” understanding of the topic. This, however, is no cause for alarm, or even mild concern. The whole point of beginning the Information cycle with this strategy is precisely so that your students have a safe way in which to “brain dump” their prior knowledge, including any misconceptions or limited thinking on the topic. The purpose of this strategy is not for you to heroically disabuse everyone in class of their erroneous thinking, but rather to accept the information they submit, not as the gospel truth, but as “what you thought of when you thought of France.”

As you work through the topic study, you will find that the organization of the Information cycle is designed to support you in returning to these original understandings and misunderstandings, so that students themselves can begin to “correct” or refine their original thoughts on the topic. This is student-centered, constructivist unit design, and it is one of the main strengths of the Information cycle.

Much of the structure and many of the strategies in the Information cycle were adopted and perhaps modified from the powerful work of Project GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design), an evidence-based approach to teaching content and language to bilingual students. Because the needs of students in the average World Language course are different from the average English Language Learner, I have experimented with the GLAD strategies and adapted them for my own students. The Information cycle can be thought of as a mini GLAD unit adapted to suit World Language courses.

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We will now take a break to explore the structure of the Information cycle. Because the planning for the cycle begins with the teacher making a “Process Grid,” and the cycle ends with the students working together to complete a blank version of the same Process Grid, after they have learned facts to fill in each of the squares in the grid, I call this series of lessons the “Process Grid Process.” Below, you will find a detailed walkthrough of the Process Grid Process, from planning to the end of the instructional sequence.

The Process Grid Process This lesson sequence scaffolds students, at any level, to become “experts” on their part of the information and teach it to the class. The process is basically a jigsaw activity, but the amount of scaffolding involved before dividing the class into their “expert groups” to read their part of the jigsawed information provides a high level of pre-teaching content and vocabulary that will support comprehension during the subsequent reading and processing activities.

The texts will be so scaffolded by the series of lessons in this process that even first-year classes can comprehend informational text containing content-area information and academic vocabulary, as well as a wide range of language features such as verb tenses and aspects and transitional and cohesive devices.

With practice and experience, you will be able to plan two to three weeks of a topic study in a few hours, by beginning with the Process Grid, using that to write the Expert Group Pages, and then planning the remaining input charts (beginning with the Visual Syllabus) and processing tools from those. For now, since this is most likely your first time through the process, rest assured that this is an overview and each lesson will be explained in the sessions that follow this one.

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This sequence is carefully designed and sequenced to prepare students to read and comprehend their Expert Group Page, working with a small group (three students is suggested). Even first-year students can, when the reading is simple, become “experts” on their subtopic.

Students will also learn an “expert” level of knowledge about the first subtopic (Breakfast, in the example above) because they will read the Expert Group Pages for that subtopic together with your support. Then they will complete a class Mind Map using the information in the class reading, before dividing up into groups to work on their own subtopic.

In their Expert Group, students will mark up the text and take notes using a Mind Map. Then the whole class will come back together to engage in a class discussion to process all the subtopics in the final lesson of the sequence: the Process Grid.

The lesson sequence is designed so that students encounter key concepts and vocabulary that will help them comprehend the class Expert Group Page in the lessons that lead up to it. In the image above, lessons 1 through 7 prepare students to read the whole-class Expert Group Page.

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Because the Expert Group Pages contain so much repeated language, reading the class page previews the language used in the pages that students will tackle in their small group.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Greet the students, review expectations, and share the lesson objective. Distribute or project a text for Reading Workshop. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Find That Cognate In this sample lesson, I use the reading provided in the Cycle Four Phase One materials from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four, shown here in French. The text for this phase is an E-Lit reader about the topic of the Information cycle. This is a Level One reader about visiting Paris, which extends upon the topic of “Regions of France.”

Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the most comprehensible.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

We will use the “Find That Cognate” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today, to ease you and your students into this reading. We will return to this reading during all the lessons in Cycle Four Phase One (the current phase), deepening our work with the language and information in this ELit text.

“Find That Cognate” should be a very familiar strategy for you by this point in the year. If you would like to review it, please see Session One for a very detailed explanation.

If you are using the E-Lit text, you will not have time to read every page today. That is fine; we return to this text repeatedly, so you can Page 396

work with the remaining pages in a later lesson. After a few minutes, you will move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Academic Card/Slide Talk.

Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input, and then Academic Slide Talk (or Card Talk). This variation on Card/Slide Talk follows the same procedures that you have used in the previous sessions in which you used this strategy. Please see Sessions 5, 8 and 17 for detailed explanations. Below, you will find a very brief graphic demonstration lesson. Your lesson will most likely be substantially more detailed. But by this point, you are familiar enough with the Card/Slide Talk strategy to fly on your own with this minor variation (“Academic” Card Talk).

After about 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Five-Finger Review Chart Move to your Review Spot. This strategy will set students up to, in Session 25 and 26, begin using the FiveFinger Review Chart in the Question and Answer Game. You will model its use today as a Scaffolded Oral Page 397

Review strategy, drawing the chart and introducing it, and then using it, with the help of the class, to retell some of the main ideas you discussed today. Example procedures are shown below.

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up for the Scaffolded Oral Review. In the images below, you will see the setup for the anchor chart as part of Shared Writing, if you chose to use a different Scaffolded Oral Review strategy.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Written Quick Quiz This familiar strategy is is explained in more detail in Session Five.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible. Ask questions and give students time to write answers, and then leave time at the end of the period to correct the quizzes. You may want to refer to Session Five for more details.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 23

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to give information about four regions of France Intermediate: say a series of connected sentences in French to give information about four regions of France, using transition words to say more Advanced: say a series of connected, well-organized sentences in French to give information about four regions of France, using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using in this session is a Picture Inquiry chart. This strategy was first introduced in Session 7. See that session for a more detailed explanation of the strategy.

The Picture Inquiry chart is a series of images that show four to six examples of each of the subtopics that you created when planning your Process Grid for this topic study. You will not speak about the Shape and Concept Categories in this session; you will simply use the images in your slideshow (or other format) to describe aspects of the subtopics, in general terms. You will begin to teach about the Shape and Concept Categories in Session 26, when you use the Input Chart strategy to teach about the first subtopic on your Process Grid.

The Picture Inquiry chart is a GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategy that falls under a collection of strategies called “Focus and Motivation.” These strategies are designed to be used at the beginning of a topic study, to rally students around the topic and, especially in the case of the Picture Inquiry chart, draw out their prior knowledge and understandings (and perhaps their misunderstandings). Therefore, you will not use the images to teach specific content, but rather to pique students’ curiosity about the topic and draw them into the Information cycle in a student-centered way.

You can choose to use a prepared series of images, such as the ones in the example lesson, which you can download from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff), or you can simply make a collection of four to six images about each of your subtopics, or use a resource from any other source. The example series of lessons that I will use in this book is from our materials. The topic of the example lessons is regions of France, and the subtopics are four specific regions: (1) Le Grand Est , (2) Normandy, (3) Corsica, and (3) La Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

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Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Pronunciation Practice See the notes in Session Three for detailed instructions on how you might conduct this Reading Workshop strategy. In this sample lesson, I return to the E-Lit reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Four Phase One, in French. Of course, you can always choose to use a text that your class produced in a previous lesson during Shared Writing, which is, in many ways, the preferable option, since the text will be customized to the class’s experiences and - because they helped to create it - highly comprehensible, even for beginners.

French E-Lit text

Tell the class what the topic of the reading is most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language.

German E-Lit text

Spanish E-Lit text

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

“I will reread this text to you in French, about visiting Paris.” (read in the course language) “Let’s practice our French pronunciation. I will read a sentence in French and then we will all read it together.

Your job is to pronounce the words as closely to how I say them as you can. We will really ‘French it up’ and try to use the ‘Frenchest’ pronunciation you can.”

(Read a sentence from the reading aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation so students will stretch their speech articulation muscles when they repeat the sentence in the same fashion.)

“OK, let’s read that together, and ‘French it up’ as much as we can.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

“Good job. But I bet you can ‘French it up’ even more. Like this. Listen.”

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(Read the same sentence aloud in the course language, really emphasizing the pronunciation, perhaps even more than the first time.)

“OK, let’s read that again, and ‘French it up’ even more.”

(Read with the class, modeling very clear and almost overly-articulated pronunciation in the course language.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, if time permits. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Picture Inquiry chart.

It is suggested to continue the routine of a brief (2-3 minutes) calendar check-in, which (1) creates an opening/transition routine and (2) continues to reinforce, daily, and in a meaningful context, important vocabulary such as the names of the months and days, weather, numbers, preferences, and activities. For guidance on how to gradually introduce new topics/ vocabulary into this daily routine, please see Session Five.

See the graphic below for the lesson procedures.

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After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, you will move on to the Scaffolded Oral Review. Please note that you will want to talk about at least one image for each of your subtopics.

You can spend more time on the pictures in the next lesson, if you want. If you have had time to discuss a sufficient amount of information, then you will move on to the next part of this strategy: the Observation Report, as shown in the images above. If you do not have time to move on to that part in the first lesson, you can plan to, in your next class session, review the images, perhaps continuing on to examine additional images, and then proceed to the chart during the Guided Oral Input time in that lesson.

You could spend as much or as little time in this session as you wish, as long as your students are engaged in the discussion of the images and in adding their noticings and thoughts to the chart.

True-False Quiz Move to your Review Spot and continue. The True-False Quiz is a very simple review strategy. For more information, please see Session Two, where it is explained and modeled in detail.

“OK, time for a review quiz. It is true (gesture thumbs up) and false (gesture thumbs down).”

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You might use a visual aid to reinforce the meaning of the words for “true” and “false” in your language, and/ or ask students, “Show me true, show me false” to help them learn and recognize the thumbs-up and thumbsdown gesture you are using.

“Remember, you will hear the question TWO TIMES. The first time, LISTEN. Do NOT talk. Just listen. The second time, answer.”

“Number One. (hold up one finger) True (gesture or use visual aid) or false (gesture or use visual aid) …. shhhhh…. Corsica is located beside the Atlantic Ocean….shhh….True (gesture/visual) or false (gesture/visual)… shhh…Corsica is located beside the Atlantic Ocean.”

(The class calls out, “FALSE!”) “Yes, FALSE! (gesture or use visual aid). Corsica is. NOT located beside the Atlantic Ocean. Which regions ARE located beside the Atlantic Ocean?” (Some students may call out, “La Nouvelle-Aquitaine! or “La Normandie!”)

“Yes la Nouvelle-Aquitaine and la Normandie are located by the Atlantic Ocean. Is Corsica located in the Mediterranean Sea or in the Pacific Ocean?” (Some students may call out, “The Mediterranean Sea!”) “Question two (hold up two fingers). True (gesture) or false (gesture)? The American cemetery in Normandy is from D-Day during World War II …. shhhhh…. The American cemetery in Normandy is from D-Day during World War II.” (The class calls out, “TRUE!”) “Yes, TRUE! (gesture or use visual aid). The American cemetery in Normandy is from D-Day during World War II. How many people in class are interested in history? Nine people in the class or ONE person in the class is interested in history?” (Some students may call out, “NINE!”) “Yes, nine people in the class are interested in history.”

Repeat with more true-false questions if time permits.

You will continue using the anchor chart you set up in Session 22, perhaps adding a few new terms to state the topic sentence and/or give details (“first,” “also,” etc.). See Session Nine for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. Below you will find a series of images showing how Shared Writing might go if you only had time to review the images in the lesson. These images are followed by a series of images showing how your Write and Discuss might go after you complete the entire strategy, using the Picture Observation Report chart.

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How Shared Writing might go if you only had time to review the images

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How Shared Writing might go after you complete the Picture Observation Report

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Q and A Game Note: For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please see Session 6 in which it was first introduced.

Students will find a partner, or you will partner them up. It might sound something like this: “Get with a partner.”

(Students get with a partner in whatever way you have chosen.)

“Decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “You will decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. Partner A will raise their hand.” (once half the class is raising their hand) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.” (repeating the directions in the course language) “I will ask a question to Partner A. Partner B will listen and count the words and gesture like this to encourage Partner A to say more. You get a point for every word you say.”

“Partner A, three important things to know about France are….? Three important things to know about France are….?”

(Partner As are talking, Partner Bs are counting. After about 20 seconds, it is usually time to move on.)

“Partner B, three important things to know about CORSICA are….? Three important things to know about Corsica are….?”

(Switch back to Partner A and continue on in this manner if time permits.)

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.

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Instructional Session 24

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write sentences in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France Intermediate: write connected sentences in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France, using transition words to organize your writing Advanced: write paragraphs in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France, using transition words to organize your writing

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Big Book. Big Books are basically a series of pictures about a certain topic, with one sentence per page that follows the same pattern (the “sentence frame”) with different facts for each picture in the book. In the context of the “Process Grid Process,” this Big Book is about the first subtopic. In the example lesson series, the first subtopic is the Grand Est region of France.

You can either make a digital Big Book, like the one in the sample lesson, or make a literal big book, as shown in the (blurry) picture below, using big pieces of posterboard paper cut in half and bound together in some fashion, perhaps with a ring clip. On each page, you affix a large picture and write in bold marker, or affix a printout of the sentence in large letters, so that students can easily read the text from their seats. I know from years of reusing my Big Books that the paper versions will last longer if you laminate them before you bind the book. You can hold the book as you teach, or prop it on an easel or perhaps in your chalk tray, and flip the page as you read the sentence on each page and talk to the class about the image on that page. Because you will select images that support the details on each page, you can point to details in the image to scaffold students’ comprehension of the main ideas of the sentence as you read it.

There are many sentence frame patterns to choose from, and some of the “traditional” Project GLAD sentence frames do not sound as harmonious when translated into other languages, so you may want to play

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around with different ways to adapt the frames to your language and preferences. Here are four common

patterns often used in Big Books.

If you prefer a digital format, which is what I use most often, you can use any format, such as a Google doc, like the example here, or a Google slideshow, as shown in the example lesson. On every slide or on every page of the document, similarly to the paper version described above, you will insert a picture and a sentence using the “frame.”

Two things that make a Big Book different from a regular slideshow is (1) on every page there is only one picture, and (2) there is a repeated sentence starter that you say on every page. Generally, you want to “angle” the sentence so that it includes some academic language, or a structure that you want to expose your students to in a targeted and repeated way, perhaps transitions or organizational phrases that they will need to know in order to take a test such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate.

If you Google “Project GLAD Big Books sentence starters” or “sentence frames,”, you will find quite a few examples of academic sentence frames, but I’ll just go ahead and give you some right now.There is one type of Big Book called “The Important Thing”. It would have a starter sentence such as: “the important thing about France is” or “the important thing about the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region is”, at the top and repeat it again at the bottom. In French, I like to use “La chose importante.” There are many different ways to

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say “the important thing about” in French, or in any language. I like to say “the important thing concerning”, because this phrase in French sounds very academic. If my students know how to say that, they are going to do really well when they have to go sit for any exam. The essay readers would most likely be impressed.

There is another frame called “Did you know” “Saviez-vous que” as in “Did you know that NouvelleAquitaine is in the Southeast of France”?

The sentence frame that you select for your Big Book is an easy, natural way to get a lot of repetitions of this key structure, as well as introduce facts about the content and build background knowledge about the topic, through the pictures that accompany and illustrate/scaffold the facts in the sentence.

Big Books are generally introduced to students at the beginning of the topic study, before students have had a lot of input on the topic. Since this is new information, and you are just beginning to explore the first subtopic (in the example lesson, the Grand Est region), it is extra important that the picture support in a very visual, concrete way what the sentence is saying, to scaffold students’ comprehension. The idea is not that they are going to understand every single word, but with pictures and repetitions of the phrases in the sentence frame, the academic language structures will “knock around” in their heads enough for them to develop a deep sense of how it sounds, so that they begin to internalize these complex structures in much the same way that a student who grew up interacting with academic-level discourse in your language would: through repeated, meaningful, contextualized, and developmentally-appropriate exposures to this level of language.

Because the language in the sentence stem or frame is repeated so much, it is important that you think about what kind of phrase you will use for your Big Book. You will be well-served by selecting phrases or expressions that you really want your students to internalize eventually and be able to use in their own speech and writing.

The pictures on the pages are an important consideration in making your Big Book. Since this is the beginning of the topic study, you want to make sure that the picture supports comprehension of the information in the sentence on that page. A well-chosen image allows you to point to specific details in the picture as you read and present the Big Book. It's probably for that reason that so many teachers prefer to make them in a digital format, because you can point on the projector screen or on the smart board to various elements inside the picture, and they are large and visible to the entire class.

One rather impressive trick that you might want to check out is the “magic paper trick.” I learned this trick, which generally impresses students with its cleverness, and is very fun to use, in a Social Studies training from Teachers Curriculum Institute, which published the History Alive! materials that my district used for middle school Social Studies. It’s easy, low-prep, and really helps to draw students’ attention to specific details in a projected image. You use a piece of heavy, blank, light-colored or white paper, such as a square of poster board or a sheet of card stock. With the image projected, you take the piece of paper and hold it in front of

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the image. The light from the projector is “caught” on the paper, and so whatever is “caught” on the paper “pops out” and appears slightly larger on the paper, as if you were holding a glowing part of the image in your hand. The real magic of this trick is that you will have a portable “magnifying glass” - the paper - that you can move around on the picture. You are literally able to hold it in your hand and point things out on this little part of the picture. With practice, you can learn to move the paper closer to and farther from the screen on which the image is projected, which gives the effect of zooming in and out of the details of the picture.

You can also play around with various shapes of paper - circles, starburst shapes, etc, for dramatic effect. Quite by accident, I discovered an even more magical trick, which is to use a paper plate.

One time I was doing a workshop, and we didn't have any paper right at hand when I needed to show some details in a projected image. So I looked around for some paper, and I noticed we were serving snacks on those white paper plates that have the little ridges around the outside of the plate. Seeing no other options, I held a plate up into the light, and it was actually much better than the magic paper trick. The “magic paper plate trick” turned out to be better because it gives this little halo around the part of the image that is “caught” on the plate. It’s really very impressive. It’s the best kind of teacher magic: inexpensive, super-low prep, and almost guaranteed to elicit oohs and aahs from your class.

Big Books are usually about 8 to 12 pages long. In this session, you will read it through and then you can go back and review it in later lessons, perhaps during Reading Workshop. That way, your students will get lot of exposure to these words, as well as reviewing the content of the book.

Big Books are a versatile and very useful teaching tool that are worth the effort you will put into creating them.

Not only can you return to them in later lessons, using them with any number of Reading Workshop, Guided Oral Input, Scaffolded Oral Review, and Student Application and Assessment strategies, you can also keep them for independent reading. You can “retire” your Big Books to the class library upon completion of the topic study. If your book is in a digital format, you might print copies of the presentation and bind the pages into a physical book, perhaps laminating the pages or putting them in a folder or slipping them into sheet protectors and inserting the pages into a report cover to make the “book” more inviting and visually pleasing to read.

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Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective. Check in with your Videographer and other students who have jobs, and distribute or project the Reading Workshop text.

Then, give the “class starting” signal and begin the lesson.

Write Inside the Story This strategy is explained in more detail in Session Nine, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy, and in Session 12, where it was first used for Reading Workshop.

In this sample lesson, I return to the E-Lit reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle Four Phase One, in French. Of course, you can always choose to use a text that your class produced in

French E-Lit text

a previous lesson during Shared Writing, which is, in many ways, the preferable option, since the text will be customized to the class’s experiences and - because they helped to create it - highly comprehensible, even for beginners.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. Words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), are in black text. The class’s stronger shared language is denoted by this color.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this text in French, about things to do in Paris, the capital of France. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write more details in the text to teach facts about Paris.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming, and then read the text in the course language and discuss the

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images and information.)

“There are three important things to know (gesture) about Paris…or there are three important things to know (gesture) if you want (gesture) to visit (point to the word) Paris?”

(Students call out.) (speaking and writing in the course language) “There are three important things to know (gesture) if you want (gesture) to visit (point to the word) Paris…or there are three important things to know (gesture) if you want (gesture) to visit (point to the word) Paris, the capital of France?”

(Students call out.)

“There are three important things to know (gesture) if you want (gesture) to visit (point to the word) Paris” (speaking and writing in the course language) “the capital of France.”

“Number one (point to the words on the anchor chart and hold up one finger) is that the Seine is a river…or number one (point to the words on the anchor chart and hold up one finger) is that the Seine is a river that traverses the city of Paris?”

(Students call out.)

Repeat with one or two other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in, and then begin using the Big Book.

Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather).

Display the slideshow, and briefly introduce the Big Book, most likely saying a sentence or two in the class’s stronger shared language.

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“This is a text about important facts concerning the Grand Est region of France.”

The lesson procedures are given below in a graphic format.

After about 12 to 15 minutes, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you were not able to show all the pages in the Big Book, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review. You could always choose to do another lesson in which the Guided Oral Input is reviewing and finishing the Big Book, or you could use the remaining pages as the basis for Reading Workshop in a future lesson.

Review Our Charts Move to your Review Spot. In this Scaffolded Oral Review strategy, you will return to charts that your class has previously made, in this case, the Picture Observation chart, and re-read the facts, observations, or thoughts that your students added to the chart the first time they worked with it. You will add more facts as students suggest them, as you review the chart, speaking mostly, if not exclusively, in the course language.

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Please note that most likely students will be able to suggest more, and think more deeply and completely to process and remember the content better, if they speak in their stronger shared language to give their suggestions. This is true for students at any level, so you will want to think about your more advanced classes, and whether or not you want to require them to engage in this - or any other class discussion - exclusively in the course language. It is generally best for their learning - at any level - if you allow them to respond in their stronger language(s) and you simply restate their suggestions in your course language, writing them in the course language and perhaps adding simple, quick sketches or translations under the new words or phrases, to reinforce the meaning, and make it easier for students to remember the meaning when they refer back to the chart in the future.

Review as many facts from your previous chart as time permits, writing new ideas/facts as students suggest, or as you think of facts that they now know that relate/extend on the information they added on the chart in the previous lesson(s).

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 22, adding two or three new terms to it today. See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session 9 for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions. The lesson example is provided below in a graphic format.

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Continue as time permits.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Write Inside the Story Write Inside the Story is explained in more detail in Session Nine. Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible. “OK, quiz time. I will read our writing. Your job is to find two sentences that could have more details in them, and then “write inside” the sentence. You copy it and then use the words/phrases on the chart to write “inside” the sentence, to add more.”

We will write inside the text.

We will use the chart.

We will add to the text.

(You might explain the activity in English and then repeat in the course language, as shown below.)

(You might model with a sentence or two, as shown below.)

Give students time to work on their writing, perhaps working with a partner.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 25

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say sentences in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information Intermediate: say a series of connected sentences in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information Advanced: say well-organized paragraphs in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Visual Syllabus. A Visual Syllabus, like the syllabus for any course, gives an overview of the entire topic study. It situates the subtopics (i.e. in this example, the subtopics are the four regions: Normandy, Corsica, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and the Grand Est) and the “shape concept categories” (i.e. in the example, Geography, Important Sites, Economy, and Cuisine) within the larger, overall structure of the topic (i.e. in this example, “Regions of France)” using some kind of

visual metaphor to arrange the subtopics and some basic information about the Shape and Concept Categories.

In this example lesson, the “visual metaphor” is the blank outline of a map of France. A blank map is wellsuited for the Visual Syllabus if you are presenting geographical information. If you are presenting historical or biographical information, you might use a timeline or road. If you are presenting information about different

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times in the day, you might use a clock. You basically want to use a format (sort of like a graphic organizer in the form of an image) that will logically hold the subtopics.

The example lesson uses a digital Visual Syllabus. It consists of the blank map on the first slide and slideable icons that you can place onto the blank map as you present the information. If you want to provide more structure and accountability for your students as they listen, you can give them a blank copy of the outline (in this case, the map of France) and ask them to make notes/sketches on their copy as they listen to the lesson, to organize and record their learning.

You can also draw the Visual Syllabus on paper as you teach the information.

In that case, you will probably want to outline the details in pencil prior to class, in much the same way as explained in Session 18. You can project the outline of the image that you want to use for the background (the map, timeline, etc) and trace it, and then write/sketch the details that you will teach about each subtopic and the Shape and Concept Categories. See the images below for guidance.

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Another option for presenting the details on the Visual Syllabus is to print or draw them on pieces of on paper, which you can affix to the background as you teach. This saves time in class as you teach. To replicate the lesson for other classes, you can simply pull off the papers from one class’s chart to re-teach to your next classes, or you can make photocopies or print multiple copies of the papers, so that you have a fresh stack for each class, which is more efficient, since you can leave the first class’s details on their paper without needing to remove and re-position them later.

You will not be able to say much, when teaching using a Visual Syllabus, about any one topic, since the time for Guided Oral Input is generally about 12 minutes. This is an exposure lesson, so the point is just to give a brief overview of the topic study (hence the name “Visual Syllabus”) to orient students to the learning to come.

Please note that you do not need to pre-teach the vocabulary. The “Process Grid Process” in this lesson sequence is designed to teach and reinforce the important vocabulary through the lessons and readings provided. The average student WILL NOT retain many of the specific words. That is not the point. The point is to equip students with enough familiarity with the terms to allow them to read the upcoming Expert Group Readings, which follow the same structure (each reading contains sections on Geography, Important Sites, Economy, and Cuisine) and recycle these terms again and again.

You will go deeper into the subtopic “Grand Est” in the next lesson, using an “Input Chart” on the first parallel subtopic (in this example, the Grand Est). Then, students will be prepared for the super-scaffolded jigsaw reading they will do in “Expert Groups” to become “experts” on one of the three other regions (i.e. Normandy, Corsica, or Nouvelle-Aquitaine) and then share their “expertise” with the other class members who did not read that subtopic in a “Process Grid.”

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. In this lesson, you might also choose to return to the Big Book from the previous lesson, either to review it or to finish presenting pages that you did not have time to use in the previous lesson(s). Distribute or project the text. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter and Videographer, and any other student workers whom you need to set up, and begin the lesson.

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Show Me Your (Writing) Moves In this sample lesson, I use the beginner reading from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four, shown below, in French. The texts for this phase are infographics. Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the most comprehensible.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. Words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), are written in black text. The class’s stronger shared language is written in this color.

Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. We will use the “Show Me Your (Writing) Moves” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today. This strategy was first introduced in Session 9, and you can find a more detailed explanation in that session.

First, tell the class what the topic of the reading is, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language, and then read it aloud in the course language and use the strategy, as modeled below.

“I will read this text to you in French, about what to do when you visit Paris. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to write sentences about the text.”

(Give the signal to start class, have your Videographer begin filming, and read the text in the course language.)

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “I want (gesture) to…class, I want (gesture) to eat (gesture) in a café…or I want (gesture) to experience (perhaps jotting in the course language to establish meaning of this close cognate) French cafés?”

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Students: Experience!

(Speaking and writing in the course language) “I want (gesture) to experience E-X-P-E-R-I-E-N-C-E French cafés. Firstly…”

“Firstly (holding up one finger and perhaps pointing to the anchor chart) I want to have French bread (pointing to the text) or firstly (holding up one finger and perhaps pointing to the anchor chart) I want (gesture) to have French lemonade (pointing to the text)?”

(You might want to give the class a check mark on the anchor chart or other location, to award a “point” for using an item from the chart.)

Repeat with a couple of other sentences, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. You can also ask students to write their own sentences, working independently or with a partner, using the anchor chart and the text to support their writing in the course language.

Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather). Then move on to the Visual Syllabus as shown in the graphics below.

After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, you will move on to the Scaffolded Oral Review. You might not have time to teach about all the Shape and Concept Categories today. That is fine; you can simply return to the Visual Syllabus in the next lesson to finish it up. If, for scheduling reasons, you cannot “afford” an additional lesson to complete the chart, then you will want to make sure that you plan this lesson so that you say only one or two simple facts about each subtopic for the Shape and Concept Categories, so that you can cover all the information in one lesson.

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Five-Finger Review Chart Move to your Review Spot. This Scaffolded Oral Review strategy was first introduced in Session 22, and it is explained in more detail in that session. In this session, you might want to have students prepare their own version of the anchor chart, so they can use it in the Student Application and Assessment for this session: the Question and Answer Game with the Five-Finger Review Chart option. See the graphics below for guidance on how this might go.

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You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 22. See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session 9 for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions.

The specific example for Shared Writing about a Visual Syllabus is found below, in graphic format.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words, read the text in its entirety.)

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s OK; it’s normal. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!”

Grammar Discussion “Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: Since you have been doing the same sequence of Shared Reading strategies, most likely you can simply move to the reading from the back of the room spot and begin asking questions, without needing to speak in English to transition. Your specific questions will vary depending on the content of the class discussion.

Q and A Game with Five-Finger Review Chart The Q and A Game is explained in more detail in Session Five, on page CheckXX, where it was first introduced. This variation challenges students to use their Five-Finger Review chart to say a string of sentences using the phrases on the chart to say more. You will want students to have their charts in front of them as they speak with their partner.

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You will also want to leave the class’s Write and Discuss text, and the Visual Syllabus, visible to the students as they speak, so that they can refer back to the language and information on the class text and from the Visual Syllabus. This not only scaffolds students to say more, but it also sets up a task in which they are quite likely to refer back to the input from the lesson, reading back over the class’s text and/or referring back to the images and words on the Visual Syllabus.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Review the Q and A Game, and perhaps set up a points system to track whether the speakers say all of the phrases on the five-finger review chart. You might give students paper clips, checkers, squares of colored paper, or other objects to mark their

chart when

their partner says the phrases. Then proceed with the Q and A Game as previously described and modeled, giving a bit more time for the speakers to answer, as they will most likely be saying more, using the chart to scaffold their responses.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 26

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say sentences in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information Intermediate: say a series of connected sentences in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information Advanced: say well-organized paragraphs in French to teach/inform about regions of France, using transitions from the anchor chart to organize the information

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is an Input Chart. Specifically, this is a Pictorial Input Chart on the first subtopic in the topic study. In the sample lesson, the topic is “Regions of France,” and the first subtopic is the Grand Est. The Pictorial Input Chart is very similar to the Visual Syllabus, explained in Session 25, in its setup and execution. One key difference is that instead of giving an overview of all the subtopics and Shape and Concept Categories, in a very general way, you will dive deeper into the first subtopic (the Grand Est in this example lesson) and teach more details about each of the Shape and Concept Categories.

The purpose of the Pictorial Input Chart is to expose students to the language and concepts that they will encounter again in the Expert Group Reading on the Grand Est (and also in the other pages that they will read in their “Expert Group” after the class finishes the lessons on the Grand Est. Thus, the speaker notes for

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each of the example slides on slides 10-16 contain the excerpt from the Expert Group Reading with the words/concepts you are using highlighted.

You do not need to worry about students’ “retaining” or “acquiring” these words...especially not in one lesson!

You do not need to “circle” around the words, or try to repeat them a lot, because (1) students will be using these words in the later part of this lesson when they assist you in Shared Writing and (2) students will encounter these words many more times in the lessons to come.

The “Process Grid Process” is the most powerful literacy jigsaw I have ever encountered. And I was an English Language Arts and Social Studies teacher for ten years, so I have tried a LOT of ways. This process is designed by Project GLAD, which is an ESOL teaching framework that I have adapted for World Language and newcomer English language learners.

As explained in Session 25, you can choose to use a prepared slideshow, such as the one shown in the sample lesson, or you can draw the chart as you speak to the class, perhaps using a penciled-in, light outline on a large piece of paper and then inking over the light outline as you speak in class.

Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. Share the lesson objective. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. In this lesson, you might also choose to return to the Big Book from the previous lesson, either to review it or to finish presenting pages that you did not have time to use in the previous lesson(s). Distribute or project the text. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter and Videographer, and any other student workers whom you need to set up, and begin the lesson.

Write Inside the Story This strategy is explained in more detail in Session Nine, when it was first introduced as a Student Application and Assessment strategy, and in Session 12,, where it was first used for Reading Workshop. Because this strategy has been explained and modeled extensively in Sessions 12, 15, 19, 21, and 24, there is no further

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explanation found in this session. For specific details on using “Write Inside the Story” with the anchor chart from the Information cycle, please see Session 24.

Of course, you can use any text with any Reading Workshop strategy that you like. It bears repeating that the Stepping Stones frameworks are designed for the maximum flexibility. So any time you want to substitute your own texts or strategies or content, you should feel

y b g n i t n i a P Numbers

free to do so, once you feel confident enough. That is my overall goal for you as you work with this book: to equip you with the tools and frameworks to “paint by numbers” so that you can generate your own lessons using these frameworks and principles as a guide.

After a few minutes of Reading Workshop, regardless of the strategy you use, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the input chart.

Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input.

Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather). Then move on to the Input Chart, as shown in the graphics below.

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After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

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Five-Finger Review Move to your Review Spot. This Scaffolded Oral Review strategy helps to review the content of the lesson and also reinforces the language from the anchor chart used to organize an information paragraph. For a more detailed explanation of this strategy, please see Session 25.

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Session 22. See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session 9 for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions.

The Shared Writing is not modeled in detail in this session. Since you are using the same anchor chart that you have been working with in all the lessons of Cycle Four Phase One, you will simply repeat very similar procedures for this lesson, with the content of the information you presented today. If you would like to review the Shared Writing images in Sessions 22 through 25, where much more detailed Shared Writing examples

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are provided, you might find that helpful as you think through this lesson, in which you will process the information on the first subtopic from the Input Chart.

Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Q and A Game with Five-Finger Review Chart The Q and A Game is explained in more detail in Session Five, where it was first introduced. This variation was introduced in Session 25.

Students will use their Five-Finger Review chart to say a string of sentences, using the phrases on the chart to say more. As you did in the previous session, you will want students to have their charts in front of them as they speak with their partner.

You will also want to leave the class’s Write and Discuss text, as well as the Input Chart, and perhaps also the Visual Syllabus from the previous session, visible to the students as they speak, so that they can refer back to the language and information on the class text and from the chart(s). This not only scaffolds students to say more, but it also sets up a task in which they are quite likely to refer back to the input from the lesson, and perhaps yesterday’s as well, reading back over the class’s text and/or referring back to the images and words on the chart(s).

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Walk to your Quiz Spot. Review the Q and A Game, and perhaps set up a points system to track whether the speakers say all of the phrases on the five-finger review chart. You might give students paper clips, checkers, squares of colored paper, or other objects to mark their chart when their partner says the phrases. Then proceed with the Q and A Game as previously described and modeled, giving a bit more time for the speakers to answer, as they will most likely be saying more, using the chart to scaffold their responses.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 27

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say strings of sentences in French to answer questions in French about the Grand Est region, and use topicspecific vocabulary that we have learned in this cycle Intermediate: say strings of sentences in French to answer questions in French about the Grand Est region, and use topic-specific vocabulary that we have learned in this cycle, and use transitions to organize your speech Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to answer questions in French about the Grand Est region, and use topic-specific vocabulary that we have learned in this cycle, and use transitions to organize your speech

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is the Word Card Review. This strategy is closely related to the Thought Bubble Review, explained in detail in Session 21. Please refer to that page for more details.

You will begin by “Reading the Walls” to review the information from the Input chart you made in Session 26.

“Reading the Walls” is a strategy that uses any artifact that you have put on the walls, such as the Kid Grid, an Input Chart, the Cognitive Content Dictionary, a One Word Image, student artwork, the calendar, etc,, to provide review of that day’s learning. This strategy can also be used as the day’s Guided Oral Input, if you have plenty of material to review.

To prepare, you will write 8-12 key terms in dark marker, each word or term on a different card, or prepare digital “cards” like those in the example lesson. These terms might be already written on the chart, or they can be words that are useful to explain or describe more abut the topic on the chart. There is really not any special formula for selecting the words, but I do like to prioritize academic terms that are specific to the topic of the topic I am reviewing, such as “agricultural product” and “metropolitan area”, in the case of, for example, a map that shows some economic regions of a country, and also less-specific, higher-frequency terms that I know are useful in other contexts, such as “compared to” or “contains” or “location”.

Then, for review in class, you simply go through the stack of words and talk about them, standing by the chart and affixing them to the chart near a place where the term is useful.

Perhaps, as you put the cards on the chart, if the terms are already written on the chart, you are simply sticking the card right on top of the term that was already there, written on the chart when you made it with the class. That’s OK; using the new card to “pop out” the term highlights it and helps to imprint it neurologically on students’ brains.

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As you go through the notes, it is best to mix together some statements about them and also some review questions. This keeps the class more engaged than simply listening to their teacher restate the facts. It also fosters a feeling of accomplishment in students, because they are able to have a high-level conversation using academic vocabulary in the course language, and also recall facts that they learned.

To “play” the Word Card Review “game” (which is not really so much of a game, but if you call it a game, then you might find that your students are “tricked” into thinking it is more fun!), you can first offer students some pronunciation practice, and a chance to “earn” the right to play the word card in the “game.”

Divide the class into two or more teams that will compete for the chance to play the card, later during the “game.” Holding the term in front of you, you first say the word and spell it aloud as you write it in a list on the board (this list will help you during game play as you can cross off the words as they are played, and it also offers a chance to reinforce the names of the letters in a meaningful academic context, instead of teaching them in alphabetical order as many language teachers are wont to do), then use the word in a sentence or ask a question with it, and then ask students to repeat it after you.

You will pretend to notice that one of the groups is repeating particularly well, you say, in L2, “Hey, the reds’ pronunciation was great. Here, reds, you earned this card!” with a big show of enthusiasm. Sometimes you just have to sort of randomly pick a team to “earn” the card; that’s OK. It is basically just a pretense to give out the word cards.

After all the words have been accounted for, you can play! You will find more details on how to play this “game” in the section below on Guided Oral Input.

Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Distribute or project the text. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

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Pronunciation Practice with Expert Group Page In this sample lesson, I use the Expert Group Page on the Grand Est from our curriculum materials, but you will use your own Expert Group readings, which you can easily make by following the instructions in Session 22.

Today, since this is the first time students will see the Expert Group Pages, you will not delve very deep into them. It is suggested that you use the familiar, and very low-stress (as well as almost no prep) Reading Workshop strategy of Pronunciation Practice.

Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. But in this particular session, as well as in Session 28, the next session, I encourage you to work with the Expert Group Pages that you will read as a class on the first subtopic, in Session 29, Expert Groups.

By working with the Expert Group Pages during Reading Expert Group

Reading Workshop in this session, you are preteaching - in a light, natural, unforced way - some of the concepts and

language prior to the next session, Session 29, in which you will spend the entire lesson reading the Class Expert Group Pages on subtopic one as a class to set students up for more independent reading of their group’s Expert Group Pages, on subtopic two or three (or four, if you have that many subtopics).

You might choose to use Find That Cognate instead, depending on your class’s interests, preferences, and needs. Because both of these strategies are very familiar by this point, there is no modeling of how to use them in this specific lesson. We now move on to the Guided Oral Input - the Word Card Review.

After a few minutes of Reading Workshop, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the class survey. You will not have time to read the entire Expert Group Page. This is actually by design; you are simply exposing students to the reading, to build confidence and perhaps also a bit of curiosity, which will come in handy when you dive into the Expert Group Reading Day in Session 29. For now, you just want to work briefly with parts of the text and move on.

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Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. It is suggested to begin with a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input, as an opening routine. The lesson procedures are modeled in graphic format, below.

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Review Our Charts Move to your Review Spot. In this Scaffolded Oral Review strategy, you will return to charts that your class has previously made, and re-read the facts, observations, or thoughts that your students added to the chart the first time they worked with it. You will add more facts as students suggest them, as you review the chart, speaking mostly, if not exclusively, in the course language.

Please note that most likely students will be able to suggest more, and think more deeply and completely to process and remember the content better if they speak in their stronger shared language to give their suggestions. This is true for students at any level, so you will want to think about your more advanced classes, and whether or not you want to require them to engage in this - or any other class discussion exclusively in the course language.

It is generally best for their learning - at any level - if you allow them to respond in their stronger language(s) and you simply restate their suggestions in your course language, writing them in the course language and perhaps adding simple, quick sketches or translations under the new words or phrases, to reinforce the meaning, and make it easier for students to remember the meaning when they refer back to the chart in the future.

Review as many facts from your previous chart as time permits, writing new ideas/facts as students suggest, or as you think of facts that they now know that relate/extend on the information they added on the chart in the previous lesson(s).

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You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up in Cycle Four Phase One, Sessions 22 - 26, to reinforce the important skill of introducing and previewing the parts of an information paragraph. You will, depending on your sense of students’ readiness to tackle additional skills, also introduce a second, complementary chart, on “teaching academic vocabulary,” or restating content-specific vocabulary in “layperson’s terms.” The goal of the kind of writing we want to model in this phase is something like this: How well do you know Oregon? There are three important aspects of Oregon’s geography to know about.

First, Oregon is a maritime climate, which means that it is beside the ocean. This makes Oregon’s weather temperate, or not too hot and not too cold. Also, Oregon is seismically active, which means that it can have earthquakes…so be careful! And thirdly, Oregon is mountainous, which means that there are lots of mountains in the state.

See the sections on Reading Workshop and Shared Writing in Session 9 for more detailed information on setting up anchor charts and goal boxes during Shared Writing. To read more details on Write and Discuss in general, please see the first eight instructional sessions. Model procedures for how your Shared Writing might go today are provided below, in graphic format.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words, read the text in its entirety.)

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s OK; it’s normal. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!”

Grammar Discussion “Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: Since you have been doing the same sequence of Shared Reading strategies, most likely you can simply move to the reading from the back of the room spot and begin asking questions, without needing to speak in English to transition. Your specific questions will vary depending on the content of the class discussion.

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Q and A Game with Word Cards The Q and A Game is explained in more detail in Session Five where it was first introduced. This variation was introduced in Session 25, and again in Session 26. This variation is a further modification, wherein students “play” word cards using the same vocabulary that you reviewed in this lesson.

Students will make their own list or cards, using your cards as a model. As they answer, they will move their cards when they say the term on them, trying to use all of the terms in their answer, or a specified number of terms, or trying to use all the terms over the curse of several answers (it’s up to you how to set this up, and you might want to consider your students’ abilities and level of confidence when tackling a challenge). As you did in the previous sessions, you will want students to have their materials - in this case, their stack of cards or vocab list - in front of them as they speak with their partner.

You will also want to leave the class’s Write and Discuss text, as well as the word cards and charts from today’s lesson, and perhaps from previous sessions, visible to the students as they speak, so that they can refer back to the language and information on the class text and from the chart(s). This not only scaffolds students to say more, but it also sets up a task in which they are quite likely to refer back to the input from the lesson, and perhaps yesterday’s as well, reading back over the class’s text and/or referring back to the images and words on the chart(s).

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Review the Q and A Game, and perhaps set up a points system to track whether the speakers say all of the phrases on the five-finger review chart. You might give students paper clips, checkers, squares of colored paper, or other objects to mark their chart when their partner says the phrases. Then proceed with the Q and A Game as previously described and modeled, giving a bit more time for the speakers to answer, as they will most likely be saying more, using the charts and their word cards to scaffold their responses.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 28

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present Intermediate: say sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present, giving details to compare descriptions of people’s internal AND external traits in the past and present Advanced: say a series of connected sentences in French to describe people in class, giving details to compare descriptions of people in the past and present, giving details to compare descriptions of people’s internal AND external traits in the past and present, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: In this session, you will learn a twist on a well-known strategy, Movie Talk, that I call “Reverse” Movie Talk.

You will first read about “traditional” Movie Talk, and then you will learn about the variation “Reverse” Movie Talk.

“Traditional” Movie Talk is a powerful strategy that is generally very well-received by students and enjoyed by teachers as well. This strategy was developed by English Language Development professor Dr. Ashley Hastings, under the name “FOCAL Skills Movie Technique,” in the 1980s and ‘90s to improve his English language students’ listening proficiency. It worked so well, and proved to be so engaging, that many World Language teachers began to adopt the practice.

“Traditional” Movie Talk uses a video clip of about one to two minutes. To deliver the input, you play the video with the sound turned off, for a short time, until a scene that you can talk about comes up. You pause the video from time to time, point to various items and people, and describe things in a slow, unhurried, clear fashion. As you point to the details of the image, you describe and narrate, and also ask a few questions, perhaps asking students to make inferences. (Why is she sad?) or predictions (What are they going to do?).

After a bit of discussion, you then play the next part of the video, pausing when there is something interesting to talk about displayed on the screen. During this part of a Movie Talk, or a “Reverse” Movie Talk, you will spend MUCH more time paused and talking than with the video running. A one-minute video will easily take five or six minutes. For that reason, it is suggested to begin with very short clips. A video that is four or five minutes long can easily take 30 minutes or more in class, when you add in all the time for pausing and discussing, and that is just too long.

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“Reverse” Movie Talk is a way to deliver a Movie Talk that I have found increases the good aspects of Movie Talk while also avoiding a common pitfall that always plagued me, which was students’ impatience with the practice of pausing the clip many times to describe and discuss the details of the images. My students would often grumble a bit when I would pause the video, because, quite understandably, they were eager to experience the video in its entirety. Reverse Movie Talk eliminates this issue, because, as the name implies, it “reverses” the order, and students watch the entire video before seeing it again with my “help” to “explain” what is going on.

The main difference is that in regular Movie Talk, the language of the video makes no difference, because you use it with the sound turned off, and simply speak over the images, while “Reverse” Movie Talk begins with a video in the course language, and you show it all the way through (or almost all the way through, if you want to preserve the ending as a “cliffhanger”), with the sound on, so that students develop a sense of humility, and feel that they need you to play the video again and “explain” it in slower, more comprehensible language, using the visual elements of the images to help them understand the details that they will surely miss the first time they watch the clip in the course language.

This part of “Reverse” Movie Talk is actually exactly the same as a traditional Movie Talk. The difference is that students generally “need” you to pause and speak comprehensibly about the video, since they generally will have many gaps in their understanding after their first time viewing the video in the course language.

Since you will watch the video again, with the sound on, in the course language, after you narrate over the images, students will feel a sense of accomplishment, as they will be able to understand the culturallyauthentic speaker(s) in the video better, the second and perhaps third times they view the video in the course language.

Saving Movie Talk for Later in the Year (i.e. Now) Now that we have a proliferation of video available through the internet, Movie Talk has skyrocketed in popularity. In fact, many teachers devote a large percentage of their entire year’s curriculum on Movie Talk. It is true that many teachers have found great success and confidence by beginning the year with Movie Talk.

However, I do not recommend using Movie Talk all year long, for several reasons: (1) Technology already plays a huge role in students’ lives today. I like the hand-built aspect of working with the students’ artwork and their own ideas and interests.

(2) Students today need community and acceptance more than ever. When we work together to create characters and stories, and to learn about each other, and to share and explore time-tested stories, we help students not just in language acquisition, but also in character development.

(3) By starting the year with more interactive language delivery methods, we teachers develop our communication skills more deeply than we could if we simply relied on Movie Talk all year.

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(4) Anything used to excess eventually loses its excitement, and it is best, in my experience, to save a visually-exciting and super-engaging strategy such as Movie Talk and Reverse Movie Talk for the point in the year when you will be glad to have an engaging, novel “trick” to pull out of your hat to reenergize the class.

By working with students’ ideas and creativity more directly all year up to this point, you have really flexed and developed your language teaching muscles, and therefore Movie Talk or Reverse Movie Talk will be no sweat for you. It has been surprising to me to see the mass confusion surrounding how to implement Movie Talk, as if it is a strange new way to teach. Perhaps that is because new-to-CI teachers are looking for the quick fix, the technology solution that will engage their students in L2 communication without them having to stand in and look their students in the eyes to deliver the instruction. Avoid putting the cart before the horse.

The horse - what is driving all the instruction you provide this year - is your skills at engaging students in your speech, always going slowly enough to make sure they understand, looking them in the eyes, pointing and pausing, disciplining yourself to illustrate each and every word as you say it (through gestures, or pointing to the word, or drawing, or using an object in the classroom, etc.), reading them for signs of boredom, knowing when to spin off into a “side conversation” about a student’s interests, and all the other skills you have developed while you have been working with all the other instructional strategies this year.

Since you have been to the Teacher Gym with me day after day this year, and perhaps bravely watched yourself on video, and worked so hard and faithfully at developing your language delivery skills, then Movie Talk or Reverse Movie Talk will be easy for you. Just talk about what you see on the screen and place your hand on concrete parts of the image, like you have been doing all year!

For a teacher with well-developed language delivery skills, Movie Talk is a treat to implement. Through your hard work this year, you have earned the ability to take up many new delivery methods and feel like an experienced violinist taking up a new piece of sheet music. After they wrap their mind around the new music, a violinist simply uses their already-developed violin-playing skills to perform a new piece.

By now you have developed your delivery skills, which are likely much stronger than you think, and certainly much stronger than they would be if you had not allowed me to work with you through the pages of this book all year up till this point. You can now start, as an experienced proficiency-based teacher, to apply your skills to different pieces of sheet music, to do a little “sight reading”, which is to say different activities like Movie Talk and those mentioned further on in this book.

You will likely find that the issues plaguing teachers who have not done the heavy lifting that describes the work you have done up to this point in the year will not really bother you. There will still be challenges, of course, but you will have grown a lot this year. You have skills that will soon start to feel “portable” to you, meaning that you can use them to tackle new strategies, and learn them more quickly, and feel more comfortable than 90% of new proficiency-based teachers, many of whom - at great cost - jump into a kaleidoscope of teaching activities without first developing their delivery skills.

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You now have strong teaching bones and muscles, so you will have no problem using them to do a Reverse Movie Talk, or a “traditional” Movie Talk, or any of the other activities that are out there swirling around online and at conferences. Further, it is my sincere hope that you have developed a sense of how the daily instructional framework and the year-long curricular framework function as a “shelving” or “cataloguing” system for all the enticing ideas you are bound to come across if you spend any time at all following blogs, Facebook groups, or conferences on communicative language teaching.

“Traditional” Movie Talk To do a traditional Movie Talk, you do not have to do much planning. (There is only slightly more planning for a “Reverse” Movie Talk, which will be explained below.). You simply need to find a short, engaging movie clip, in any language. You can use any clip that you think your students will enjoy watching. If you want to align it to the current phase and cycle — Cycle Four, Information, Phase Two, Organization and Vocabulary — then you will want to select a clip, in any language, that relates to your informational topic. Or, you could just take a quick break from the topic, and spend a day teaching an unrelated, but fun and pedagogically-valuable, clip about any topic.

For your first clip, should you want to begin with a regular Movie Talk, I suggest using a very short video. A French teacher from California, Erik Olsen, at a presentation at COFLT in Oregon in 2016, suggested a 44second clip of a toilet paper ad with a funny twist ending. It is short, hilarious, and has plenty to talk about, so it makes a good first Movie Talk. You can easily find this video by googling “toilet paper iPad commercial.” I have literally never had a bad experience using this short video in class, except for the aforementioned light grumbling from students who were eager to just watch the video all the way through.

Even though the toilet paper clip is less than a minute in length, the Movie Talk can require up to five or six minutes or more. This is because you will basically be treating the clip like a collection of still images to discuss. For a traditional Movie Talk, I suggest that first you explain to the students that they will see the video with the sound turned off, and you will help them understand the video by pausing it and telling them what is going on, speaking in the target language. Be sure to inform the students that they will see the video in its entirety at the end.

To prepare the video, I like to watch it and make notes for myself, or just imagine good places to stop. You will most likely want to stop about six to eight times during a one-minute video. When you stop, you will want the image that is projected at that moment to be interesting, with specific things (objects, characters, locations, facial expressions, etc.) that you can point to and talk about. You want to use concrete, visual information to scaffold the students’ comprehension of the plot, as you would with any visual aid to support comprehension.

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Before you start the Movie Talk, you might say a sentence or two in the students’ stronger shared language, to give a bit of background information about the clip. For instance, with the iPad commercial, you might say, “This is a commercial from France. It has a funny ending. We will watch it two times and the first time I will pause it and explain things to you in French. This is so you can learn more French. Then we will watch it the normal way with the sound on and no stopping.”

Begin the video with the sound turned off. Play it for a short time, until a scene that you can talk about comes up. Pause the video from time to time, point to various items and people, and describe things in a slow, unhurried, clear fashion. Ask a few questions, perhaps asking students to make inferences. (Why is she sad?) or predictions (What are they going to do?).

After a bit of discussion, play the next part of the video and pause when there is something interesting to talk about displayed on the screen. You will spend MUCH more time paused and talking than with the video running. A one-minute video will easily take five or six minutes. For that reason, and I repeat this point from above et again because of its importance, it is suggested to begin with very short clips. A video that is four or five minutes long can easily take 30 minutes or more in class, and that is just too long here at the class’s first experiences with Movie Talk. Remember, you are trying to keep the activity a “begged-for” experience. Plus, you are trying to build your skills in manageable chunks. A one- or two-minute video is a better playground for you, and more manageable.

Even with a short video, you do not even have to Movie Talk the entire thing. On her blog, The Comprehensible Classroom, Martina Bex provides very valuable insights on how to end a Movie Talk. If the video has a twist ending, sometimes it is fun to not talk about the whole video but rather leave a “cliffhanger” and have students make inferences and predictions, and then show the ending in the next step when you play the video all the way through. It is pretty much required that at the end of the experience, you play the video all the way through with the sound on. If you do not, be prepared for a social uprising among the students.

Reverse Movie Talk As mentioned above, my students often grumbled during Movie Talks, because it is sometimes frustrating to have their viewing interrupted when the natural human tendency is to just see what happens in the clip. I developed this modification in which I can actually have students who WANT to hear me explain what happened in the clip, because they cannot understand it on their own. They also may come to really see the value of your Teacher Skills at helping them understand the language, after they watch the clip in L2 (French

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or Spanish for me) and feel the need for someone to guide them through the content. Try it; you just might like it. I know it was a major game-changer for me!

Unlike “traditional” Movie Talk, for a “Reverse” Movie Talk, you will select a video in the course language that relates to the topic you want to address. You will, as explained above, want to select a short video (or a short part of a longer video) so that you can play a two- to three-minute video clip in the course language, with the sound on.

The first time you play the clip, you will do so with the sound on, perhaps slowing the playback speed to 75% of normal, to help students’ comprehension. To further support comprehension, you can also choose to play the video with the subtitles on, in the course language. It is entirely your choice whether to use subtitles.

There are benefits to students’ language acquisition to reading the subtitles in the course language as they hear the language in the video, so there is truly no reason not to turn the subtitles on, unless you want to offer your students (especially more advanced students) a more challenging listening experience.

In order to increase students’ motivation to listen to you speak about the video the second time you show it, when you will pause the clip and speak about the images as described above for “regular” Movie Talk, you will ask students to write or sketch a certain number of notes about the main ideas and details of the video before you play it the first time with the sound on in the course language. You might give them a graphic organizer or simply have them take notes on a blank sheet of paper.

Asking students to take notes from a culturally-authentic video — even one made for preschoolers — is an ever-so-slightly “mean” trick to play on your students, as you are basically setting them up for some frustration during this first viewing of the clip.

You will want to tell them to make a number of notes that you intuit is slightly too challenging for your class, when watching the video for the first time, in the course language, with no teacher support. Most students will not be able to complete the task, and so they will generally be asking you to “slow down” or “pause” or “go back” or “explain” the video. You now have them right where you want them — wanting you to deliver a “traditional” Movie Talk, complete with plenty of pausing and pointing out visual details in slow, concrete, comprehensible language delivered as only their beloved, skilled, and suddenly very much appreciated teacher can do for them. This is the power of “reversing” the Movie Talk procedures: eager listeners who want what you are planning to offer!

I like to select educational videos produced for children who speak the course language. Educational children’s videos generally use clearer, slower speech, and more visual aids than videos produced for older speakers of the language. I like to tell my students, before this first viewing, that this video was made for French-speaking five-year-olds, and perhaps that I will reduce the speed to 75% to help them catch more of the language. Knowing that they are watching a little kid video, at 75% speed no less, helps them to develop that sense of humility, because they will most likely still not understand enough quickly enough to take the amount of notes I specified during this first viewing.

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I want them to feel this slight frustration. In fact, I am counting on it, because it tends to greatly increase their engagement with my “teacher talk” through the video, after they watch it once or twice all the way through with the sound on. Because students generally want to get the number of notes you told them would earn an A - or whatever criterion you specify - they will usually be quite eager for your “support” when you replay the video and explain the details to them in a way they can comprehend more fully.

You will not want to be so “mean” as not to inform your students prior to viewing the clip that they will most likely not understand all of what is said in the course language. You can reassure them that you will "help them understand more” after they watch it. Then make sure students are set up with note-taking materials and play the clip once or twice with the sound on. You might stop the video before the very end, if you want to preserve a “cliffhanger” for the final viewing. This is fun, but not necessary, especially with “Reverse” Movie Talk, since you are using these slightly mean tricks to build natural motivation to attend to your teacher talk with the sound turned off.

After you have shown the clip one or two times with the sound on, you will replay it with the sound off and lead a discussion (basically a normal Movie Talk) in which you pause at key moments to explain the action in comprehensible language, using the paused image from the video as visual support that you can point to as you narrate and describe the clip’s contents. Stop again before the "cliffhanger" you did not show the first time(s) you showed the video, if applicable.

Then, re-play the clip with the sound back on, with or without subtitles in the course language, so that students can enjoy the ending of the clip and also feel the satisfaction of understanding more the second time around. You can ask students to add to their notes or write words and phrases they recognize. You might play the clip once without allowing students to write, so that they can engage with the listening task with their full attention, and then ask them to take up their materials and make notes as you play the clip a final time with the language on.

Once you have selected your course language clip (and perhaps also practiced or “warmed up” with a “traditional” Movie Talk, maybe using the iPad commercial suggested above), you are ready for this lesson.

Now we will move on to the lesson procedures.

Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. Distribute or project the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter and Videographer, and any other student workers with whom you need to touch base, and begin the lesson.

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In Other Words In this sample lesson, I use the French Class Expert Group Page (on the first subtopic, in this case the Grand Est region of France) from our materials.

Expert Group

Reading

Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. But in this particular session, I encourage you to work with the Expert Group Pages that you will read as a class on the first subtopic.

By working with the Expert Group Pages during Reading Workshop in this session, you are pre-teaching - in a light, natural, unforced way - some of the concepts and language prior to the next session, Session 29, in which you will spend the entire lesson reading the Class Expert Group Pages on subtopic one as a class to set students up for more independent reading of their group’s Expert Group Pages, on subtopic two or three (or four, if you have that many subtopics).

Hand out (or project/display) the Reading Workshop text. Once the students can see the projected text, or they have it on their desks, you can proceed. First, most likely speaking in the class’s stronger shared language tell the class that today you will be focusing on teaching the meaning of “fancy” words using simpler terms. Add the phrase “in other words” (or an equivalent) to the anchor chart. Then, tell them what the topic of the reading is and read it aloud in the course language as you use the strategy, as modeled below.

Following the conventions of this book, the lesson notes are written in English. Words that are said in the course language (French, in this example), are in black text. The class’s stronger shared language is in this color.

“I will read this text about the Grand Est to you in French. We will continue using this list of words (point to the anchor chart) to say the ‘fancy’ words in simpler terms.”

(Give the signal to start class, and have your Videographer begin filming.)

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(read the text in the course language) (Speaking and writing in the course language) “Strasbourg is the ‘chef-lieu’ or in other words…” (perhaps give the class a check or a point for using the term from the anchor chart, if you want) “In other words, Strasbourg is the capital of…the region? Strasbourg is the capital of…the government?” (some students may call out suggestions) (Speaking and writing in the course language) “In other words, Strasbourg is the capital of the government. Class, what is the capital of the government of the USA?” (some students may call out Washington! or Washington, DC! etc.)

“Yes, the capital of the government of the USA is Washington, D.C. What is the capital of the government of Oregon?” (some students may call out Salem! or Portland (a common misconception)! etc.)

“Yes, the capital of the government of Oregon is in Salem.” (reread the next part of the text in the course language) (Speaking and writing in the course language) “The Vosges are a ‘massif’ or in other words…” (perhaps give the class a check or a point for using the term from the anchor chart, if you want) “In other words, the Vosges are a group of mountains? The Vosges are a…chain of mountains? The Vosges are a…line of mountains?” (some students may call out suggestions) (Speaking and writing in the course language) “In other words, the Vosges are a chain or a line of mountains. Class, what is a ‘massif’ or chain or group of mountains in the USA?” (some students may call out The Rocky Mountains! or The Appalachian Mountains! etc.)

“Yes, the Rockies and the Appalachians are ‘massifs’ or chains or groups of mountains in the USA. Repeat with a couple of other sentences, if time permits, using the term(s) on your Anchor Chart to restate the information from the Reading Workshop text. After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Reverse Movie Talk.

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Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. Examples of calendar check-in are found in the previous instructional sessions, and there is no example here. Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather).

See the graphics below for a demonstration of the sample lesson, a Reverse Movie Talk using a video called “Le Grand Est, une région à explorer grâce au sport!” produced by the YouTube channel “Region Grand Est.”

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After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Finish My Sentence Move to your Review Spot. For more details on “Finish My Sentence” see Session 5.

“Time for ‘Finish My Sentence.’ I will say a fact in French, and then you will all speak in French as long as you can, to finish the sentence and say more facts. I will listen and count to six on my fingers. If everyone is still talking when I get to six, the class will get a point, but if not, point for me!”

“Number One (hold up one finger). The group was walking in the mountains and…(counting silently on your fingers)…one, two…”

(The class speaks in French saying endings like, “beautiful mountains,” “eat in a restaurant” or other statements according to their ability.)

“Six! Good job, a point for the class!” (Tally the class points, perhaps writing on the board.)

“Number Two (hold up two fingers). The group visited…”

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(The class speaks in French saying various endings as you count the seconds.)

(Repeat, if time permits.)

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you added to during Reading Workshop today. See below for a sample lesson based on the Reverse Movie Talk demonstrated in the Guided Oral Input above.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson in detail, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in detail in the previous sessions.

Read in the Language “Now I will read to you in French and then we will read in English together.” (reading with expression, and pointing to the words, read the text in its entirety.)

Choral Translation “Now we will read together. Read with the class, not faster not slower, not louder, not softer, just say each word as I highlight it. It might be in a strange order when we say the English, but that’s OK; it’s normal. Say the words as I point. 3-2-1, go!”

Grammar Discussion “Did anyone notice anything else about the French language, how it is spelled, or put together, that they can teach the class?”

(Lead a brief class discussion and circle any students’ noticings on the text, ideally using a second color, and perhaps writing the students’ name/initials by their contribution.)

To continue to Reading from the Back of the Room: Since you have been doing the same sequence of Shared Reading strategies, most likely you can simply move to the reading from the back of the room spot and begin asking questions, without needing to speak in English to transition. Your specific questions will vary depending on the content of the class discussion.

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Q and A Game with Word Cards The Q and A Game is explained in more detail in Session Five, where it was first introduced. Variations using charts and cards to support students to use the language from the anchor chart were introduced in Session 25, and again in Session 26. This variation is a further modification, wherein students “play” word cards using the same vocabulary that you reviewed in this lesson. See Session 27 for a more detailed description of this variation on the Q and A Game.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Review the Q and A Game, and perhaps set up a points system to track whether the speakers say all of the phrases on their cards, or use a certain number of them. You might give students paper clips, checkers, squares of colored paper, or other objects to mark their chart when their partner says the phrases. Then proceed with the Q and A Game as previously described and modeled, giving a bit more time for the speakers to answer, as they will most likely be saying more, using the charts and their word cards to scaffold their responses.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 29

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more Intermediate: say a series of sentences in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more and using transitions to organize your information Advanced: say a well-organized informational paragraph in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more and using transitions to organize your information and restate content-specific words in simpler terms to teach new vocabulary to the reader Preparation: You come now to the expert group reading day, when you will read the Expert Group Pages on the first subtopic (in this example, the Grand Est region of France) together as a class, and model the process that students will later complete with their Expert Group, using an Expert Group Page on one of the other subtopics (in this example, either the Normandy, Corsica, or Nouvelle-Aquitaine region). This lesson is basically one long, extended Reading Workshop, and therefore we will not follow the usual daily framework.

You have, by now, provided quite a lot of input about the first subtopic. You looked at pictures of the Grand Est region, and all the regions, in the Picture Inquiry Chart in Session 23. You read a Big Book on the Grand Est region in Session 24. You taught basic information about the Grand Est, and all the regions, using the Visual Syllabus in Session 25. You taught more details on the Grand Est, specifically about facts from the Shape and Concept Categories (Geography, Important Cultural Sites, Economy, and Cuisine), using a Pictorial Input Chart in Session 26. You reviewed key terms from the Pictorial Input Chart on the Grand Est using the Word Card Review strategy in Session 27. And, finally, you used a video clip on the Grand Est in Session 28 using the Reverse Movie Talk strategy. Additionally, if you have implemented the suggestions in Reading Workshop in Sessions 27 and 28, you have already previewed the Expert Group Page on the Grand Est (or your first subtopic) to prepare for this lesson.

In this session, you will lead students through their first Expert Group Page reading, teaching and modeling strategies that they will use when they work with their own expert pages. You are advised to run off copies of the pages for each student, or provide some other individual response format, for example, perhaps a Desmos lesson, or a Peardeck or Nearpod slide, if teaching via computer.

Once you work through this reading together, your students will be very familiar with this process, and they will then to apply it to their own Expert Group Page that they will read later as a group with their little expert group of three kids.

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First you will read the entire text aloud in the course language, without pausing to teach specific terms/words.

This may push some of your “teacher buttons” because you might notice that some of the words are quite low-frequency, such as “hauteur” (“height”) or “siège” (“seat”), and you might feel some anxiety that you have not taught these words. You should not have pre-taught all the words in the reading.

They are designed to include a few unknown, challenging terms. This is intentional.

Words such as these, presented in a meaningful context, and with all the prior scaffolding that you have built into the “Process Grid Process,” are like Easter eggs for your students, little hidden gems that they maybe have never seen before, but that give their minds something to work with. Some readers will just pick up the meaning from the context, while others will have a chance to experience a slight breakdown in comprehension (or, for some readers, even a major breakdown in comprehension) when they encounter these terms.

However, this is a controlled and scaffolded level of challenge, because with all the context and information that you have provided, and the support of the process that you will use to read and mark the Expert Group Page as a class, the overall meaning will be clear, and students will have a chance to “discover” or “figure out” the meaning of the terms, which is using the powerful educational strategy of “teaching into cognitive dissonance,” as described in great detail in Session 17 on page CheckXX. You are going to scaffold your students through reading and marking the pages using the following process.

First, as explained above, you will read the entire text aloud, fluidly, at a natural pace (suited to your students’ abilities, of course), and not stopping to teach specific vocabulary. The idea is that students experience the text as a whole piece before you dive in and work through it in detail.

Before you continue with the second reading, you will want to direct students to raise their hand to indicate when you come to a word that they think is important to know, or a word that sounds very “brainy” or “smart” or “impressive” or “academic.” If your classes are not very volunteer-oriented, or you have reason to suspect that they will not be a forthcoming as you want them to be, with the raised-hands request, you might specify a certain number of these “fancy” terms that you will want them to indicate to you in each paragraph.

For example, you might say, “I will read very slowly, and we will mark at least five terms per paragraph. If we don’t see them the first time we read, I will read the paragraph again, to give us time to find at least five important, “fancy” terms. Most students really dislike having to repeat the same thing over and over, so this trick will train even a reluctant class to make with the words or suffer through multiple readings of the same passage.

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Then read the text again, very, very slowly this time. As you are reading, when you get to a word that someone thinks is important, they raise their hand to signal that they have a word. You will stop there and model how to highlight using a specific procedure - highlight the first letter, then the last letter, then the middle letters.

Maybe somebody raises their hand when you say “habitants” (“inhabitants” in French).

So then, speaking in the language, you will say each letter in the language as you highlight it.

With the example of “habitants,” you would say, speaking in the course language, “Color ‘habitants.’

Color the h, color the s, and color the a-b-i-t-a-n-t.

Habitants.”

This process is shown in more detail below.

Students will work along with you, highlighting on their paper, marking as you model, the first letter, the last letter, and all the letters in between. This way of highlighting gets students to think a little harder about the words they choose, and at it slows them down. Sometimes students will just paint the entire page with the highlighter color, and this “paint the page yellow” approach doesn't really do much for memory, retention, or learning. It does keep the highlighter companies in business, though. Their shareholders are probably jumping up and down with glee every time a seventh-grade social studies teacher starts a “notetaking unit.” This specific procedure, which I learned from a BeGLAD training, gives purpose to the highlighting.

After you highlight the word, you will want to switch to pen or pencil to circle the word and draw a line

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from the word to the box under the paragraph, where you will copy the word and then draw a little sketch to help remember the meaning of the word. In the example for the word “region” you might draw a map pin symbol on a shape to look like a region. These steps are illustrated in more detail below.

It is best if you can discipline yourself to not start doing a lot of talking in the class’s stronger shared language, but rather to talk about the vocabulary and model the steps (circle, color in, draw, etc.) in the course language. You can so very easily get lost in the weeds with every hand in the class up in the air, hoping to use you as their Personal Walking, Talking Dictionary.

You will want to avoid just “giving the answer away,” by just saying, “This means that.” The learning for students is in the doing, in this case (and in many others), so just giving them the translation deprives their brains of a valuable learning experience.

The purpose of this strategy is so much deeper than just simply providing the word in the stronger language, or even teaching that specific vocabulary in the course language. This process gives students a carefullytitrated dose of challenge: not too much, but just enough to keep their brains engaged with some “puzzles” to solve (in a supported, low-stakes way, of course). If students stop the process to ask you exactly what the word means, you could define it for them if you want, or you could lead them to try figure out in the context, by re-reading the section and asking the class to paraphrase, or having everyone talk to a partner to paraphrase/ process the sentence(s) you re-read.

After you model highlighting and sketching for the first term, continue to work through the whole paragraph. I like to “back up” to the beginning of the paragraph, or at least to the beginning of the sentence, to re-read and get us back into the flow of the text.

This process really unpacks the language and the information. You will read and highlight paragraph by paragraph, most likely working the whole period to read through and mark the entire text. If your students would find this challenging - so much reading in one day! - then you can choose to read one paragraph per day over the course of a series of lessons, during a longer-than-normal Reading Workshop, using this method of marking the text. The example Expert Group Pages for the Grand Est region contain four paragraphs, so if you choose this approach, you would spend four days of extended Reading Workshops to process the entire reading.

If you choose to divide the reading up in this way, you will want to have another strategy prepped for the Guided Oral Input and the rest of the daily instructional framework on the days when you schedule the

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reading. The Reading Workshop will most likely, especially on the first day, be at least twice as long as a normal class session, so you will want to plan a very simple Guided Oral Input strategy, or perhaps a game or other interactive activity, to make use of the remaining time in the class period on these days.

You have learned, in this book, a number of various strategies that, if you want, you could plan for the rest of your class periods. If you are especially planned-out, you can use these strategies to help students gain exposure to terms and facts that they will encounter in the next paragraph of the text, which you will read in the following class session. You could plan Movie Talks or Reverse Movie Talks, review your Big Book, or make a second Big Book specific to the information in an upcoming paragraph of the reading, or take a break from all the Information strategies to tell them a story about the topic, perhaps using a Visual Story.

Suggestions for how you might schedule these lessons are provided below.

You will either read and process the entire passage in one lesson, perhaps continuing on to the suggested Student Application and Assessment strategy (Finish My Sentence) given below, or spend three to four days “spreading out” the reading during an extended Reading Workshop period and then continuing on to an abbreviated daily instructional framework, as suggested in the images below.

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Finish My Sentence Move to your Quiz Spot. For more details on “Finish My Sentence” see Session 5. For a sample of how Finish My Sentence might sound in a lesson on informational texts, please see the Scaffolded Oral Review section of Session 28.

Extensions to Fill the Rest of the Period (if needed) If the reading went very quickly, and you have so much time at the end of class that three or four rounds of Finish My Sentence don’t get you to the end of the period, you can move on to any other Student Application and Assessment strategy that you have used in this book, or any other closure/review strategy that you and your students enjoy.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Instructional Session 30

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say sentences in French to give information in French about the Grand Est region of France, using contentspecific vocabulary Intermediate: say a series of connected sentences in French to give information in French about the Grand Est region of France, using content-specific vocabulary, and using transition words to say more Advanced: say well-organized paragraphs in French to give information in French about the Grand Est region of France, using content-specific vocabulary, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Mind Map. This strategy is used to process the information from the Expert Group Pages. You will first process the class’s shared Expert Group Pages on the first subtopic (the Grand Est region, in the example lesson), and then, when students are finished working with their Expert Group to read, highlight, and sketch/copy (as modeled in Session 29), they will complete a group Mind Map to record and reinforce their learning on their group’s subtopic (Normandy, Corsica, or Nouvelle-Aquitaine, in the example materials).

The class mind map is like a Vulcan mind-meld of everyone in class, except you do not have to have Vulcan Powers. You will us the information based on what we have all just learned.

You might want to make the mind map ahead of time, or you could talk your class through the process while making it on an overhead, on chart paper, or on the board, as students replicate the Mind Map on their own paper. You could also just have students watch as you create and fill in the Mind Map, as you lead the class discussion.

The subtopic that you learned and read about as a class will go in the middle of the Mind Map. Draw a shape in the middle - whatever shape and color you assigned to the subtopic when you set up the Process Grid, and then draw lines off the central topic and draw the shapes that you chose for each of the Shape and Concept Categories on “sticks” or lines radiating out from the subtopic. Each one of the categories correspond to one of the paragraphs in the Expert Group Pages you read as a class.

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Because you have just finished the reading, and your students have their marked-up texts with them for reference, and you have taken them through the tightly-planned and very scaffolded Process Grid Process to arrive at this point, you and your students will most likely be quite pleasantly surprised at how much information they are able to contribute in the course language as you fill in the Mind Map. You are heading into the “release” phase of the Process Grid Process, when students will be doing much more self-directed learning. You have planted the seeds and thoroughly fertilized and watered them, and now you will begin to reap the harvest. It’s magical to witness!

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. Distribute or project the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter and Videographer, and any other student workers with whom you need to touch base, and begin the lesson.

In Other Words Please refer back to Session 28 for a detailed explanation and sample lesson using this strategy. You might want to add an additional phrase to your anchor chart that students can use to restate content-specific vocabulary. It’s also completely OK if you don’t, and you just recycle the term(s) that you have already added to the chart.

After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the class Mind Map.

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Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. Examples of calendar check-in are found in the previous instructional sessions, and there is no example here. Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather).

See the graphic lesson procedures for the Mind Map below.

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After about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how much of the Mind Map you have filled in, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Review Our Charts Move to your Review Spot. This Scaffolded Oral Review strategy is explained in detail in Session 21.

Review as many facts from your previous chart as time permits, perhaps using word cards as explained in Session 27. This is an excellent way to “warm students up” to begin the Sentence Patterning Chart for Shared Writing, as explained below.

Sentence Patterning Chart Today, you will learn about one of the most engaging, fun Shared Writing strategies I know: the Sentence Patterning Chart. I like to call them “Word Rainbows” because it is a lot more fun to say, and they are, in fact rainbow-colored and also made out of words. Sentence Patterning Charts are a GLAD strategy that are super-fun to make and use, and they can provide a nice break in the daily writing routine. They are bestused towards the end of a topic study, and generally best-suited to informational content, such as historical, cultural, or geographical information. It is recommended that you use this strategy towards the end of the topic study, as is scheduled in this lesson sequence, so that students will have interacted with a good amount of language that might be used to write about a category of information that was central to the topic study.

Sentence Patterning Charts can also serve as a word bank from which students can draw when speaking or writing about the topic, and they also have the nice little bonus of reinforcing English Language Arts standards — parts of speech — and are also a way to “teach grammar as a concept in context,” which is one of the six

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Core Practices recommended by ACTFL. Plus, they are just really fun and visually appealing, because each column is color coded.

Many teachers color code them red, then orange, then green, blue, and purple so that the completed chart looks like a rainbow. That’s not totally necessary, but it is just super-satisfying to create a “word rainbow” with your class, and it is a fun strategy to announce to the class because most people really like rainbows. “Hey, we are going to make a rainbow!” sounds a lot more fun than the truth, which is “Hey, let’s review the PARTS OF SPEECH!” You can read the procedures in the next

Red Black Orange Green Blue Purple

paragraphs, and also see a graphic version of pictures from a workshop below, to picture this

very visual strategy. To begin, simply choose one noun (or a noun phrase) that your students know well. In the example, I chose the noun “sites” to correspond with the topic study of regions of France. You will preselect ONE noun, and perhaps also fill it in on the chart. The rest of the columns will be filled during class with your students’ ideas and suggestions.

Working in front of your students, you will make a grid with room for adjectives, the noun that you have chosen, verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. In French, we have to have two adjective columns due to the

large number of common adjectives that come before the noun, as well as the even-more-common position after the noun. You might have to change the order of the columns, or add more than one column for a certain part of speech, depending on the way that your language behaves.

During class, you will briefly introduce each part of speech, generally beginning with adjectives, writing the title in the course language (e.g. “adjectifs” or “adjectives” in

French) and a few examples in the top of the chart,

using the color you assign to that column, and

briefly explaining what its function is.

Then you have students generate possible words for each column, brainstorming adjectives, verbs, etc. that could be used to form a sentence with the chosen noun. You will record students’ contributions - even if they are a little wacky - in a list in the applicable column, ideally writing in the color you have assigned to that part of speech.

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The words that they give might not be all that “academic”; that is fine. They might also call out ideas in their stronger shared language(s); that is also fine. Just write down all their ideas in a list, and add a sketch to show the meaning of the word, and translate any words that they offer in their stronger language(s) into the course language as you write.

Note: You might feel nervous, if your course language is not your strongest language, at the thought of having to take students’ off-the-cuff ideas and translate them into your language. Here is a nifty “trick” that may help you deal with such a situation.

If, at any time I am making a chart or writing in front of the class, I find that I do not know a word, or that I’m unsure of a word, or I have forgotten it, which happens often since I don’t generally teach in my native language, I use a modification that I developed, of a trick that my GLAD trainers taught me. They modeled jotting a “SP?” for “Spelling?” in a circle around the word. Sometimes, even though they actually know how to spell a word, GLAD-aligned teachers will “pretend forget” how to spell it, to model this helpful habit for their students, to increase the chances that they will begin doing this on their own.

Extending on that strategy for World Language students, and their often-harried, non-native speaker teachers, I will sometimes put a “FR?” around words I do not know how to translate, and that I need to look up.

Sometimes I tell the class, “Oh, I forgot that word in French.” This is a good way to model for your students that you are still a language learner, and it takes the pressure off of us to know everything about the languages we teach. Even native speakers who know all the words in the unabridged dictionary would be well-advised to pretend not to know the occasional word, and say, “Oh, I forgot how we say that,” in order to model this strategy for students. The idea is that if they are writing and they do not know a word, or they are not sure how to spell something, that they will simply make a note of it and come back later to fix it.

Once students have generated a list of adjectives, you move on to the next part of speech and generate a list of possible verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases that could be used when writing about the topic. You might only list a few words in each column the first time you use a Sentence Patterning Chart, but that is okay; you can come back to it in subsequent lessons and add more, which is an excellent review strategy for these final lessons in the Information cycle.

For Shared Reading, you will process the chart using a super-fun and almost magical-seeming strategy that I

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call “The Farmer in the Dell” Reading. Before we move on to Shared Reading, please study the following images of a real-life Sentence Patterning Chart.

“We are going to make a word rainbow.”

Spell out the noun. It should be one that students are very familiar with. Write “noun” in

Define (or ask students to define) a “noun” (a person, a place, or a thing) and draw sketches.

“HOW can (Noun) be? Are they GOOD (gesture) or BAD (gesture)?” Write good or bad, depending on students’ responses, make a sketch of the word, and then ask “How ELSE can (Noun) be? and write students’ suggestions.

Write students’ suggestions, then say, “HOW” (and write “HOW”) a (Noun) is, that is an ADJECTIVE (write in the course language and make sketch(es).

“What can (Noun) DO? Say some VERBS that (Noun) can DO. A VERB is an ACTION…like jumping (jump) or clapping (clap)”).” (Write/sketch “Verb” and “Actions.”)

(List students’ suggestions.)

“HOW can (Noun) (one of the verbs)? Well (gesture)? Badly (gesture)? Loud (raise voice)?

Quiet (whisper)? HOW can (Noun) (one of the verbs)?” (write, define, and sketch “Adverbs” as modeled above. for other columns.)

(singing the parts of speech)

(modeling singing a sentence)

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“WHERE can (Noun) (one of the verbs) (perhaps also one of the adverbs)? In Portland? In Montréal? WHEN can…(give examples to elicit suggestions, as modeled above) WITH WHOM can… (give examples)” (making a list of prepositional phrases)

“The Farmer in the Dell” Reading Shared Reading is quite different when using a Sentence Patterning Chart for Shared Writing. It’s more like “shared SINGING!” It’s a nice break from the routine.

Once the chart is done (which can take a couple of lessons), then you can have student volunteers choose the words they want to combine into a sentence, by coming up to the chart and putting post-it notes on the words they want the class to use. They need to choose two adjectives and one from each of the other lists.

Then, quite surprisingly, the sentence can almost always be easily sung to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.”

It goes like this, but you might need to switch up the order in your language:

A volunteer marki

ng the

Adjective, Adjective, Noun (to the tune, “The farmer in the dell…”)

Adjective, Adjective, Noun (to the tune, “The farmer in the dell…”)

Adjective, Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adverb, Prepositional Phrase (to the tune, “Hi, ho, the derry-oh, the farmer in the dell…”)

You can sing the tune with the names of the parts of speech in your course language a few times, just for “practice” and to reinforce the names of the parts of speech in L2. Literally, you would sing,

“Adjectif, Nom, Adjectif… Adjectif, Nom, Adjectif…Adjectif, Nom, Adjectif….

Verbe, Adverbe, Phrase prépositionnelle!”

Then, once you are all warmed up, you can sing the sentence for your students (or sing along with your class).

You can then have another volunteer remove the first set of post-its and make another one, if time permits.

To review the information you have studied, or just to have fun, you can return to the chart at any time.

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You will perhaps be surprised at how often, after you make a Word Rainbow Chart, how much you see kids sneaking glances at it when they are writing or speaking, or even listening to lessons on the same topic. It somehow “sticks” in the brain in a very deep way, and, for many students, it serves as a valuable resource for the duration of the rest of the topic study.

Nine times out of ten, “The Farmer in the Dell” fits almost

Sentence Patterning Chart You can have your students make their own Sentence Patterning Chart, working independently or with a partner, or perhaps working in the Expert Group that you will assign them to in the next session, to read their Expert Group Pages. This is a good way for the group to “gel” with a creative, fun, often silly activity: copying the chart and adding their own words to it. You can provide the noun or let students/groups choose their own.

You can specify that they have to include a certain number of elements from various columns of the class chart, if you want. This helps students process the elements they are copying again, and reinforces the language used in the lesson.

You can have students make a Sentence Patterning Chart and then conduct a “Farmer in the Dell” competition, with students trading charts and engaging in a singing competition (Room 22’s Got Talent called…they want their talent back). If your students love Sentence Patterning Charts as much as most of mine have, then you will surely find plenty of ways to use them to extend the language input, reinforce students’ learning, and have a down-home kneeslappin’ hootenanny of a good time up in German class!

Just in case my Georgia’s acting up again, I am defining this term, for those who did not benefit from a southern upbrangin’.

At the end of the period, as always, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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Welcome to Easy Street!

This is a special day…or days. It could be one day, if you are in a hurry to get somewhere, or you could take multiple days, which is like teacher Shangri-La. It is like the nirvana of teaching. And no, I’m not talking about the grunge band from Seattle. I'm talking about real nirvana, like paradise. Expert Group Reading Days are basically Teacher Paradise, because you are about to get your kids interacting with their expert group pages, which means that they will be getting absolutely tons of high-quality language input, while you take on thr role of Guide on the Side. In small groups, your class will read an Expert Group Page about one of the remaining subtopics from the Process Grid. In this example, they will read about one of the remaining regions of France: Normandy, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, or Corsica.

All the work the you and the class did together with the first subtopic (the Grand Est, in this example) has prepared them for this day, or two or maybe even three days, to work on their own. You simply move into the role of guide, coach, and manager, as they interact with the language in a deep way, because of all the scaffolding and preparation that is built into the lessons and materials that you have created or developed together throughout the preceding sessions in Cycle Four (Information). Yeah, it's better than a Nirvana concert in 1993.

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Before we look into this much-touted Teacher Vacay, we need to get one thing out of the way. English. Or whatever the students’ stronger shared language is.

You will hear it during this session. Probably a lot. But it’s OK. It’s actually worth it.

Here’s the deal.

When the kids are doing this work, I know from experience, there will be a lot of English being spoken among the kids. It its worth it because of the high level of reading

interpretation that they are

able to do and the high level of topic-specific language that they are able to address in these very scaffolded reading tasks that were set up throughout this whole process.

It’s a trade-off. But if you think about how much language input they have gotten all year long, and how much they are getting from the readings, you will most likely agree that it is worth the “price.” Further, students will most likely find it very frustrating to try to complete the tasks that comprise this session in the course language. It’s just not worth the frustration.

You could always skip this session, if you just cannot abide English in your classroom. You probably should.

Even upper-level students quite likely would feel the need to discuss and process in their stronger shared language, at least some of the time when they are working in their groups. Of course, it’s your choice, ultimately, but just gird yourself for some hitches in your giddy-up if you do choose to maintain the expectation that students complete the rather challenging (yet completely achievable due to all the prior scaffolding in the Process Grid Process) task of processing their group’s reading.

Below, you can see an outline of the process. Then we will dive into each step and you will read an explanation of how to set up, manage, and quality check the groups’ work.

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Setting Up the Expert Groups I recommend that you divide the class into groups of three students. I learned in a BeGLAD training that research has suggested that three is the optimal number of members in a high-performing group. You will probably want to form the groups yourself, so that you can group students in heterogeneous, or in other words, mixed-ability groups, so that each group, as much as possible, is comprised of member whose reading ability is high, medium, and low. You might not readily know your students’ reading levels. When in doubt, ask their English Language Arts teacher, who will most likely have that data handy. You could also ask Guidance or your administrator for students’ reading scores on standardized testing, but these scores are in no way able to give a full picture of a student’s true abilities. Teacher data and observations are much more reliable and usually give much more detailed insight.

If your class does not evenly divide into groups of three, you will need to make one group of two or four. But you are strongly encouraged to use heterogeneous groups of three as much as possible.

Each group will need the following materials.

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Managing the Expert Groups as They Work Before you get started, you will want to think about how to keep everybody working the whole time, even if their group completes their reading early. They are going to be working somewhat independently, so want to set up some systems where they are going to have some quality control with you, the teacher, and they are not just sitting over there farting around and goofing off.

You will also want to have some activities ready for groups who finish early. I suggest the GLAD strategy of “Team Tasks.” Set up a menu of team tasks that will serve as “sponge activities” to “soak up” early finishers’ extra time, and keep them learning, engaging with the language, and - perhaps most importantly our of your hair as you manage the rest of the class. Some sample Team Tasks are given here, but you can select any task that requires them to use the information and language in their group’s reading, in a creative way, and gives them options over what they choose to complete.

Team tasks are not the main task of the Expert Groups. The group’s main task is marking up their expert group reading, like you did with the text that you read as a class in Session 29, and then making a group Mind Map for their subtopic, just like you did as a whole class in Session 30. Team Tasks are for differentiation. They are not optional, as you will require students to work the whole time you have scheduled for the Expert Group Reading Day(s), but not every team will complete Team Tasks. So they are not optional but they are an option. More suggestions on Team Tasks will be provided below.

I suggest that you tell your students that their grade for the Expert Group reading is not based on finishing fast or getting done before everybody else. Their grade is based on learning the whole time for the next two days, next three days, or even the next four days. Take a vacation, give yourself a sub day.

Seriously, you want - above all else - to make sure that you set up the expectation that everyone works the whole time. Otherwise, you will have created an incentive to rush through the work, and do a half-hearted job, to get to the “prize” of extra time to go on their phones, visit, relax, or just cut the fool. So please take pains to establish a workshop-like environment tin which here really is no finished. There's no “Done.” You want people to keep re-interacting with the language for the entire course of however many days that you have planned for Expert Group Reading Day(s).

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The Group’s First Job: Reading, Highlighting, and Sketching The group’s first task is to work through the text together. You truly do want the groups working together, especially because the less-skilled reader in the group will really benefit from their teammates’ working with them every step of the way, through every line of text.

This is why you will only provide ONE shared copy of the text for each group. It goes a long way towards ensuring that the groups truly do work together. As they read, students will mark it with the shared group highlighter (which will encourage them to work together to choose the words they highlight, to indicate the “important” or “key” terms in each section. You might want to specify that they highlight at least a certain number of words in each paragraph. If you do so, you will want the number of terms in each part to be a multiple of three, because there are three people in each group, and each one should be doing an equal amount of work. For example, you might tell them that they need six sketches for the first paragraph, six sketches for the second paragraph, and so on.

Instruct students to highlight using the same method that you demonstrated and taught when you read the class Expert Group Page: first letter, last letter, and everything in between. You might require them to pass the highlighter around in the group, taking turns wielding the mighty group highlighter.

After they highlight a term in the reading, they will take turns using their different-colored pens to circle the term, draw a line to the box under the paragraph, copy the word, and make a sketch to show its meaning.

A Process Chart for the First Step

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A “Process Chart” is a special kind of input chart. It tells you how to do something. Process Charts are superuseful in working with language learners, because as you have probably noticed, giving directions that students understand (and actually follow) is hard. It’s hard even for teachers whose classes are conducted in the stronger shared language! But World Language teachers really have to work to impart directions, if they want to speak in the course language. Process Charts to the rescue!

Because input charts use so many visual symbols, you are basically creating a handy visual step-by-step guide to doing whatever it is that you want students to do. Additionally, the chart is displayed where students can refer to it as they work, which might cut down on the number of “I just explained that three minutes ago!” moments in this lesson.

See the example below for a Process Chart that explains to students what to do in their groups for this first step. When you make the chart, I suggest that you begin with a blank page, and write/sketch symbols as you speak to your students. My suggestion is that, when making a new Process Chart, you write in the course language on the chart and speak in the stronger shared language, as modeled below. Then, later when you are referring back to the chart, you will most likely find that you can speak in the course language and your students will understand.

This Process Chart is entitled, “Expert Reading.”

Below, you will find suggested ways to explain the elements of this chart as you sketch and write in front of your class to make it.

1.

I will divide you into groups. Groups of three people. That’s YOU, plus TWO other people. NOT you plus one more person, NOT you plus three others. YOU plus two. How many is that total? Yes. Three.

Some groups will read about Corsica (labeled on the chart with “Corsica” or “C”), some will read about Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and some about Normandy.

2. You will have three pens and one highlighter. Each person will choose a color. Each color will make three notes per paragraph (or however many you wnt to ask your students to annotate).

3. When you finish, come see me with your group. Bring your paper. If there is a line just wait in it. But please DO NOT be grumpy!

4. If you are waiting, just come to the front and watch and listen. You will learn a thing or two.

5. When your group is okayed, you will move to the next step.

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You can supercharge the Process Chart’s comprehensibility by speaking in the class’s stronger shared language as you make the chart, but writing/sketching in the course language. This “glues” the comprehensibility of the stronger shared language onto the chart, so that it is “stuck” in students’ minds when they refer back to it, even though the writing on the chart is in the course language. You can set up the chart in this way and then, when you refer to it in the future, speak in the course language, pointing to the sketches and symbols on the chart to reactivate students’ memories of what the symbols mean, because when they originally saw them being created, you “glued” the stronger shared language into their minds. This is powerful, and I highly recommend using this process to create a Process Chart any time you need to convey directions that you will need to repeat in the future.

Once you have your groups set up and working on their expert group pages, better grab a cup of coffee fat, because the “Me” Time probably won’t last too long. You will soon have some groups bringing up their page to you. You might ask them to bring up their first paragraph without finishing the other two, so you can make sure that they are on the right track. If they have done this before, it is more likely that you can tell them to finish the whole page and then bring it to you. When they bring it to you, you might make a process chart similar to this one that shows them how the quality control process will go.

This process chart is based on the process that I like to go through.

I like to make a little version of this chart and keep it by my work area, so I can remind myself of the steps I intend to use.

Each step is explained in more detail below.

1. I ask the first student what color they used. I would look at their Expert Group page with their notes on it, point to the colors to reinforce what I am asking, and say, “I see…green…who used green?”

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2. I ask the student who used green to count the sketches on the group’s sheet with me. If I told them that they need nine things in each paragraph, then that means each student had to do three. I count one to nine with the student(s) counting along. I say “Good job, you’ve got nine”.

Note: If they do not have nine, I send the whole group back to work and make sure that kid has nine things. I don't care if somebody else picked up the slack. That's not the message I'm trying to impart to my kids. I don't want them to think that they are going to have the smart kid or the fast kid do all the work. So even if everybody in the group is complaining, I just remind them that everybody is expected to learn the same equal amount. That's why we use different colors. So I do NOT go on to check more work from this group. I have them sit as close to me as they comfortably and reasonably can, so I can keep an eye on their hopefullyimproved group workflow, and tell them to make the kid do some more work.

3. If they have everything all in order, then I move on to the next step in this guided conversation. I ask them to show me their favorite drawings in the first paragraph. They just point at it. Many students say the term from the text that they copied in the box, but they don’t have to. Many times, I have to name the drawing for them in the language. They might not know the name of the thing that they drew, in the course language.

For example, if they drew somebody looking tired, they might not remember the word for tired in the course language. So, if they drew a tired person, and the word in the text was “fed up,” (as in “frustrated with something that will not stop”), but clearly the student is trying to describe the sketch but doesn’t have the vocabulary, I would simply tell them in French "la personne a l'air fatiguée.” This basically gives them the word, in a meaningful, communicative context, if they didn’t already have it.

4. I ask them in the course language, What word from the text does this “tired person” (fill in the words that you just used when asking the student what their favorite drawing was) represent? "Quel mot dans le texte représente la personne fatiguée?” The term is already highlighted in the text, so it shouldn't be hard for the student to find it. Basically, I'm trying to scaffolded them with easy questions that lead up to some harder questions, so they can start having these, small academic conversations with their teacher.

The other two group members are listening and watching, as I interact with the first student, but that's fine.

They all know what is in this document. They have all done the work together. Now they are putting some conversation - interpersonal communication - to this information.

Often, you will have another group waiting to talk about their paper. When this happens, you can make the waiting more educationally-valuable (and also keep the lined-up students quiet so that those who are working can have a more focused work environment) by asking the other group(s) to look over the shoulders of the first group. Give them a little note-taking sheet, if you want them to be really focused on listening. I tell them that as they are listening to make notes, and (to provide a level of accountability and “teeth” in my request) I say that I expect them to turn these notes in when they arrive at the front of the line and we talk. This makes the waiting much more educationally-sound, because they are hearing some more interpersonal communication (and keeping busy) while they wait.

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5. If I feel that we have the time, I will ask them why does this tired person represent the term fed up? Maybe the text said, in French, “Jacques Cousteau was fed up with everyone eating so much fish. So he launched Vegans for Fish Incorporated. (I made this up for the purpose of this explanation). This is a slightly more challenging task, but it - like the whole Process Grid Process is super-scaffolded. The student can basically look back into the text to tell me why, or if they are an advanced learner, a more confident student, or they are in a higher level class, then I can delve in deeper with them and ask them some more questions.

If their expert page is to my satisfaction, I give them their group Mind Map. This is like the “prize,” except that the prize is…MORE WORK! If their work in step one was not done to my satisfaction, I'll send them off to make improvements.

Either way, yay, more learning!

After they check in to quality control (or QC) their notes, the group will work together to create one shared group Mind Map for their topic, writing facts from the reading in the course language on their Mind Map, in much the same way that you did as a class for the first subtopic.

You can set this task up in many different ways. Groups could do one big mind map on a piece of chart paper, and then come together to synthesize everyone’s information into a group sheet, or they could simply make a Mind Map on a regular-sized sheet of paper.

Before sending the group off to work, you might refer them back to the class mind map, perhaps hanging on the wall, to help them get started. There is so much language input happening in this step, even if students are interacting in English, because while they are filling in the mind map, they are going to have to start, even if they are talking about the process in English, using the language from the reading and putting it, or choosing it, or selecting it, or arranging it onto their mind map. The mind map is going to be completely created in the language. Their use of the language might not be perfect, they might not arrange it perfectly, they might add some things that are not perfect language. But they are going to be processing and doing a lot of interaction with that text and these topic-specific terms.

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You can require them to do certain things on their mind map like use

all of the

highlighted terms that you drew pictures of or added sketches to

show

their meaning. Once the group has completed their shared Mind

Map,

you could have each student generate their own copy of the mind That is particularly useful if you do ever want to use the mind maps

map. for

more advanced uses.

One of the ways you can use the Mind Maps is a student who worked in the Normandy expert group would match up with students

from

Corsica and Nouvelle-Aquitaine groups to trade information, making

notes

on a blank mind map or another graphic organizer (e.g. perhaps a

Venn

Diagram, a Three-Circle Venn Diagram, or a T-Chart) of what they

are

learning about the other subtopics. Even in the most basic format,

the Mind

Map gets them to interact quite a bit with the language and with that text, and they read it with a critical eye and a task that they have to do.

One thing that you should know if you have everybody doing their own individual mind map is that the content should match up. So even if everyone is doing their own, they should all be identical copies of the same information. If you let them do whatever they want on their own paper, as you probably have seen happen in your own class, the advanced kids will just leave everybody else in the dust and the kids that most need the support will be left to struggle through the task on their own.

After the Expert Group Reading Day(s), you can have students use these mind maps for all kinds of things, especially if you want to do some presentational speaking or interpersonal communication tasks, in particular for older or upper level students. You could have them use their notes from the Expert Groups to plan in a

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little presentation, perhaps using the appropriate level of the Presentational Speaking Rubric, shown here and available in the Appendices.

This rubric is great because it includes transitional words and introductions, and it gives you some teaching points to use in preparing students as they plan, practice, and deliver their presentations. If you look into the rubric and see the criteria for an A or B, it gives you some teaching points on delivery and how to help them with their public speaking.

I really love teaching specific public speaking skills. When I taught social studies we were required to do a couple speeches. We had to collect speaking work samples. For some reason, they always made social studies the discipline that was in charge of that. Health did one and we did two in Social Studies. We would do a lot of speaking practice and speaking preparation. There are some pretty fun teaching points in that academic or advanced presentational speaking rubric.

You can have them use their mind map for anything that you want, to extend the learning further, or you can simply move on to the final lesson in the sequence - the class Process Grid. But first, let’s look at the final steps of the Expert Group Reading Day(s).

When groups are finished with their Mind Map, they will bring you their work and you can ask them some questions about it and, if time permits, engage them in conversation, like you did when they brought you their reading notes in Step Two. When you are sure that it looks good and you are going to give them a good grade and they are finished, it is time for them to start doing some team tasks. So, there really is no finished. There's no “Done.”

These Team Tasks are basically something for your fast finishers to do when their entire group is finished and their work has been checked and approved. You want to prepare a choice board of team tasks they can complete, to process the information from their reading in a new way. I like to tell them that their grade is not

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based on finishing fast or getting done before everybody else. Their grade is based on learning the whole time for the next two days, next three days, or even the next four days. However long I want my visit to Teacher Shangri-La to last.

The team task board should have different various options. You can put anything on here that you want. You can say, make a crossword puzzle, make your own input chart, make a quiz about your expert group pages, find a movie on a clip and write questions about it. There are all kinds of things that you can do, but what you want to be sure of is that you have some “sponge” team task activities prepared for the early finishers.

You really need to set up the expectation at the beginning of this fun day, the objective and your expectation is that everyone is going to work the entire time. There is no getting Done. If they are finished with their expert page task, they need to be working on a team task. If they are not working on a team task, they are not meeting your expectations for doing school in class today.

I want to impress to you it is very important to set up your Team Tasks.

Without them, and without the clear expectation that the groups will work the entire time to interact with the readings, your potential visit to ShangriLa can quite easily become a real drag.

You can display the Team Tasks on the board or on chart paper, and/or give the groups a sheet with the list on it. Explain to the kids and be clear about what you want them to do if they finish their group expert pages.

You want people to keep re-interacting with that information for the entire course of however many days that you have planned out to do this expert group work. For more ideas on Team Tasks, please see the appendices for more information on Learning Logs. You could also ask them or give them the option of doing these team tasks with the other groups’ topics, using copies of the other Expert Group Pages. So if they read about Corsica in their group, you might have them read about Normandy or Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and do some tasks with that topic.

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Instructional Session 31

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: say sentences in French to give information about regions of France, using topic-specific vocabulary Intermediate: say a series of connected sentences in French to give information in French about the Grand Est region of France, using content-specific vocabulary, and using transition words to say more Advanced: say well-organized paragraphs in French to give information in French about the Grand Est region of France, using content-specific vocabulary, and using transition words to say more

Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Process Grid. You have come full circle because you are at the end of the topic study. You started with a Process Grid, which was basically your planning document, and now you are going to end by filling in a Process Grid with the class to synthesize their learning and scaffold the Expert Groups to share facts about their subtopic with the other students who were in other groups and thus have not learned about that topic. The grid will be blank when you begin the Guided Oral Input today, and you will make it with the class.

This is a way for students to really do a lot of synthesis and review. You studied the first subtopic together as a class (the Grand Est region, in the example lessons), and then in their Expert Group, students explored one of the other regions in-depth as well. As you work together to fill in the Process Grid, they will review the Grand Est, offer facts about the region, they studied with their group, and learn about the other two regions, which they have not yet studied. To “warm up” and model the process, I like to start with the first row - the Shape and Concept Categories about the first subtopic (the Grand Est, in the example lessons) before moving on to the other rows, about the other subtopics that students read about in small groups.

Unlike the Expert Group Reading Day(s), the Process Grid discussion can be conducted almost entirely in the course language. Students can respond in the language, and it is very satisfying, for both teacher and students, to set up that expectation and see students able to rise to the challenge. It is in this final lesson that the true power of the Process Grid Process is felt. You have provided such a well thought-out, scaffolded, level-appropriate, backwards-designed learning sequence that your students will most likely have lots of words and facts to talk about. Plus, you are advised to have them keep their readings and notes and Mind Maps handy, so they can refer to all that comprehensible text to help them form responses to the questions you will ask as you fill in the Process Grid together.

The process goes something like this. You are advised to begin by reviewing the Shape and Concept Categories for the first subtopic, which you studied extensively together as a whole class. You might say something like, “The first region that we studied was the Grand Est. Can anybody tell us about the geography

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of the region?” Students will likely call out some different facts. If they speak in English, you can direct them to restate the facts in the course language, by saying something like, “Look at the text” or “Look at the Mind Map,” and then restating the question in the course language. This exchange might sound something like this: “The first region (holding up one finger) that we studied was the Grand Est (writing “Grand Est” on the Process Grid in the course language). Capital G-R-A-N-D-space-Capital E-S-T. Can anybody tell us about the geography (writing “Geography” on the Process Grid in the course language) G-E-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y of the region?” (students call out facts in their stronger language(s)) “Look (gesture) at the text (point to or indicate the text) and look at the Mind Map (point to or indicate the Mind Map). Can anybody tell us about the geography (point to the word on the Process Grid) of the Grand Est region (point to the word on the Process Grid)?” (students consult the resources and call out facts in the course language) Take notes on the Process Grid about what they say in the color that corresponds to the Grand Est subtopic (you want to keep the topics color coordinated to previous charts).

Please note that your goal is not to write down every single fact from the reading on the Process Grid. That would be a very tedious process. Your goal is to write two or three of the most interesting or memorable facts in each box. How do you know what facts were interesting or memorable? They will be, quite conveniently, the ones that your students call out to add to the chart. You do not have to worry about the facts that the groups don’t mention. Just fill in two or three facts in each square and move on, so the discussion does not start to drag.

It is worth briefly considering your instructional goals here. Your primary goal is not to have students learn or retain the specific facts about their subtopic, or the first subtopic that you studied as a class (e.g. the Grand Est), or any of the other subtopics. The ACTFL standards, and most state standards, specify that students are to make intercultural comparisons and interact in the language, using the language to explore cultural products and practices, and make inferences about how those products and practices influence cultural perspectives. They do not specify the specific content, so you will not find learning objectives like “name the largest industries in the Normandy region” in the standards documents.

Your goals here - and in most every lesson in this book - are to provide well-scaffolded, sequenced language interactions that allow students to use the language to explore cultural products and practices, and the perspectives that they influence, as well as to develop deeper understandings of themselves and their classmates, as a target-language-using learning community. So, your main objective in this session is to use the Process Grid to facilitate a high-level discussion in the course language to compare, contrast, and draw connections between and inferences from, the topics you studied in the lesson sequence.

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You might choose to focus the discussion on one row of the Process Grid (i.e. one subtopic, for example the Normandy region, in the example) at a time, and discuss/write facts about each of the Shape and Concept Categories for that subtopic before moving on to the next row to discuss the next subtopic. You could also choose to process the entire first row, about the shared subtopic you studied in depth as a class (e.g. the Grand Est region), and then “open up the floor” to a less-structured discussion in which you “bounce around” from square to square on the Process Grid in more of a free-form jam, until you have two or three facts in each square.

This “free-form jam” approach is usually more engaging to students because of the element of randomness.

It also has the potential to lead to more comparing and contrasting, and thus more high-level thinking, as the facts from one square tend to spark other groups’ memories, and they offer similar or contrasting information about another square in the grid. However, this less structured approach is more challenging to manage, so you will, as always, want to consider your students’ need for structure and your own level of tolerance for a more free-form delivery style before choosing this approach.

Whatever approach you choose to structure the discussion, you will want to draw some sketches/pictures beside the information as you add it to the Process Grid chart, because the facts about other groups’ subtopics are not going to be as familiar, naturally, as those that we studied as a class (about, in this example, the Grand Est) or the subtopic they worked with in their Expert Group.

Well, the Process Grid is the last lesson in the process grid process. So, you have arrived at the end! It’s pretty cool, amirite? It's one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done as a teacher, and I hope that you enjoy it, too.

If you want to stretch the learning on this topic further, you could plan follow-up lessons with more input about the topic. Or you could plan an additional Process Grid Process, using another topic. You could easily spend another three weeks working with another Informational topic, and reusing or adding to the anchor charts you set up during this Process Grid Process (organizing information and incorporating topic-specific vocabulary).

At the end of the second round, students would have a well-developed repertoire of strategies and language for writing well-organized information passages.

Another option for extending the learning is to check out the appendix on Learning Logs, and have them do a learning log. You could spend a whole two or three extra days having them work on a learning log that could be turned into an artifact that goes into your class library. Or they could work on a magazine together as a class about their various topics, with each group contributing a page and/or an infographic or images with captions or callout boxes, or a comic book, or a page for the class yearbook or an aspect of their topic.

Now, on to the lesson procedures for this final step-by-step session!

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Continue to greet the students in English, review expectations, etc. Distribute or project the Reading Workshop text. You might make your own Reading Workshop text, use the ones in our Teachers Pay Teachers store, such as the example below, or work with a Shared Writing text from a previous lesson. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter and Videographer, and any other student workers with whom you need to touch base, and begin the lesson.

In Other Words Please refer back to Session 28 on page CheckXX for a detailed explanation and sample lesson using this strategy. You might want to add an additional phrase to your anchor chart that students can use to restate content-specific vocabulary. It’s also completely OK if you don’t, and you just recycle the term(s) that you have already added to the chart. You might use a page from the Expert Group reading, the E-Lit text that was used in the first lessons of this phase, a text from Shared Writing, or any other comprehensible informational text.

After a few minutes, move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the class Mind Map.

Quick Calendar Check-In Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input. It is suggested that you continue to do a brief calendar check-in throughout the year to transition to the Guided Oral Input, as an opening routine. Examples of calendar check-in are found in the previous instructional sessions, and there is no example here. Refer to Sessions 1-8 for more details on Small Talk (calendar and weather).

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See the images below for some topic on setting up your Process Grid prior to class, followed by images of how the lesson might go.

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See the images above for a demonstration of how the Guided Oral Input might go when using the Process Grid.

For most classes, you will not have time in the typical 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input - or even in the 20 minutes or so in a block class - to complete the entire chart. So, you will need to think through some options for how you want to structure the lesson, explained below.

You might want to move on to Scaffolded Oral Review and the rest of the daily instructional framework in the usual fashion. That means that, as you have done in most lessons, after about 12 to 15 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how much of the Process Grid you completed, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review and the rest of the lesson. You may want to schedule the lessons this way, so you can get back into the routine - which you broke with for a few days during the Expert Group Reading Day(s) - of moving on to the rest of the daily instructional framework components.

If you choose this option, you will probably want to come back to the Process Grid in the next lesson, to add more facts to the chart, and then review and use the new facts you added that day in the rest of the framework (Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment), spending as many days as you need to in order to make it through every square on the chart.

Another option is to delay getting back into the normal routine of following the daily instructional framework, and make this another special day, in which you spend the entire lesson — the remainder of the period — working towards the goal of filling in two or three facts or details in each of the squares on the Process Grid.

This means that you will most likely not have time to go on to the remaining components of the daily instructional framework in that lesson.

If that is the case, you could plan on a second lesson in which you get back into the routine of the daily framework, and use the “Review Our Charts” strategy as the Guided Oral Input for that day, followed by any Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment strategies that are a good fit for your students.

Again, Stepping Stones is designed for the maximum flexibility, and it is my sincere hope that by this time, as you are arriving at the final “hand-holding” lesson of this book, you feel confident that you can actually plan quickly, using the frameworks and organizing principles in the Stepping Stones curricular framework, to adapt and modify on the fly as described above.

I hope that this book has been a boon to you this year, and has provided strong, friendly guidance and plenty of details and ideas to make your job easier. If it has, or even if it hasn’t, you can feel free to drop me a line at tina@curriculumclub.com. I would love to hear how it has gone for you!

If you do plan to continue on to the rest of the daily instructional framework, you will find suggestions for how that might go below.

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Review Our Charts (or any other Scaffolded Oral Review strategy) Move to your Review Spot. This strategy, explained in more detail in Session 27, on page CheckXX, you will return to charts from the topic study. You can compare the information on the charts with what the class has added to the Process Grid, and perhaps add more details, or any insights that emerge for students, to the Process Grid.

You might, as always, modify or switch out the specific strategy you use here. Some options that would fit well at this point in the topic study are the Word Card Review, Finish My Sentence, or even just a Quick Quiz or a True-False Quiz. Review as many facts from your previous charts as time permits.

You might want to get back to “normal” Shared Writing after your foray into the world of Sentence Patterning Charts in Session 30. Or, you might want to add to your Sentence Patterning Chart or make a new one.

If you want to get back into the Write and Discuss routine, you may want to continue using the anchor chart that you set up in Session 27 (Incorporating Content-Specific Vocabulary), and perhaps also the anchor chart that you set up in Cycle Four Phase One (Organizing Information Writing). You might add a new term or phrase to one or both of the charts today.

If you want to keep using the Sentence Patterning Chart strategy, you might want to quickly refresh your memory by taking a look at the explanation and images in Session 30.

After about eight to ten minutes of Shared Writing, move on to Shared Reading.

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The “Go-To” Daily Strategies If you returned to Write and Discuss, then you might also want to return to the “Go-To” strategies, to reestablish the normal routine. Many classes benefit from a nice “reset” by strictly adhering to the established routine after a break in continuity such as you just experienced during the Expert Group Reading Day(s). If so, you may want to review any Shared Reading section in any of the preceding sessions, to review the “GoTo” strategies.

“Farmer in the Dell” Reading If you worked with the Sentence Patterning Chart for Shared Writing, you might want to process it using the world-famous “Farmer in the Dell” Song-stravaganza. To review the procedures for this strategy, please see Session 30.

Sentence Patterning Chart This Student Application and Assessment strategy was introduced and explained in more detail in Session 30.

You may want to review that section at this point.

Learning Logs Learning Logs are a place to collect their learning through a topic study. When I learned how to make learning logs at the Be GLAD training I attended, they told us that the ideal format is plain copy paper stapled or three-hole-punched and put into a folder or report cover. This is to allow students the most possibilities for flexible, creative, and critical thinking.

Each day, you would give students options on a choice board or menu (see the Appendices for a sample choice board that works well for World Language students). I do recommend giving students at least three options so that they have more of a voice in how they express and collect their learning.

The GLAD way to teach is grounded, above all, in student choice and supporting them in developing agency, and a sense of control and internal motivation in their education. This is also, as mentioned in the very first

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parts of this book, a foundational value of the TCRWP (Teachers College Reading and Writing Project) reading and writing workshop approach to literacy, as well as a big factor in why I fell on Ben Slavic’s pioneering work and creative inventions like a starving woman on a ham sandwich.

All of these approaches to teaching language and literacy center students’ voices and identities, to one extent or another, and develop their sense of agency or self-motivation and self-awareness as a learner. So, options are recommended for Learning Logs, and, really, student options are recommended any time you can offer choices in a pedagogically-sound and developmentally-appropriate way.

If you are familiar with the Love and Logic school of thought, you will recall that part of the “love” is making sure that your toddler brushes their teeth.

But part of the “logic” is that any rational adult human who has ever attempted to order a headstrong three-year-old around will almost certainly have deduced that it is pretty much impossible.

So, “logically,” we give the toddler a choice. But, since we are “lovingly” making sure that they actually hold onto the little teethies in their little mouthies because they don’t neglect to brush them, we offer them choices that lead to the same outcome, ultimately.

So, you might say, “You can brush your teeth with the kid toothpaste or the adult toothpaste,” or “You can brush your teeth with the egg timer or I can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ three times to let you know when time’s up.

What do you want to do?” That last “What do you want to do?” is the most powerful part of the whole setup.

It conveys to the child that they are in control, even as they make healthy choices that we have structured for them.

Of course, as an educator, you may be familiar with the “OMG Mom Stop the Teacher Tricks” like I began to get from my daughter. She was the guinea pig for so many “communication strategies” and “behavior management strategies” that I wanted to learn for my work as a teacher that eventually she became immune and would roll her little 7-year-old eyes and say stuff like, “Mom, you can just tell me to brush. It’s OK.” So, just be warned.

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My daughter will be 24 years old in 2021, and she turned out really well. But the poor thing did suffer a lot of Teacher’s Child Problems, growing up.

Máire, if you are reading this, thanks sweetie, for your patience. I love you!

Now, you can either call me to tell me you love me too, or just shoot me a text. Honey, it’s your choice.

So, with the overarching goal of students are “lightly guided” to choose an option for recording their learning in L2 (and perhaps also L1, if they feel they need it) that appeals to them, given their own learning preferences and the nature of the information learned and discussed that day.

Students might select and use a graphic organizer, or copy a chart from the walls, make their own Cognitive Content Dictionary to record new facts or words from the day’s lesson, sketch and label a picture or chart that the class discussed, make their own Sentence Patterning Chart, copy the class’s text and translate it or illustrate it, or “Write Inside the Story” with it, or write an alternate ending for it, write their own notes or paragraph, or draw their own representation of the day’s learning.

It is recommended that before you add a strategy to the choices, you first model that strategy by using it in class. For example, after you have done a Sentence Patterning Chart, perhaps once or twice, you can then add that strategy as an option for learning logs. As you introduce more instructional strategies in class, the “menu” of options for work in their learning logs will grow.

See the Appendices for more details and a sample choice menu.

At the end of the period, as always, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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End of the Year Option 1: Festival of Worksheets This project is a great way to get your kids watching and re-watching videos in the course language as they produce worksheets and answer keys for their classmates. The major benefit for you in choosing this project is that students will get lots of language input, during the process of making their worksheet and answer key, and also during the actual Festival of Worksheets, when they will view other groups’ videos and compete to see if they can find details that the group did not include in the answer key. In order to gain a class point, students will be hunting for the “less-obvious” details that the team did not find as they prepped the answer key.

The entire process requires and rewards close listening and re-listening, so you will have created the

Pabl o Román’s “Dre aming Span ish” YuTu

conditions for your students to be authentically

be Chan nel

motivated to listen and re-listen closely during both the “Making the Worksheets” phase, when they watch and re-watch their video(s), as well as the “Festival of Worksheets” phase, when they will watch and re-watch the other groups’ videos. It’s a great break for you at the end of the year, because it gets you off the “stage” and lets the videos do the talking for you, and your students continue to get lots of highquality input in the language. Win-win!

Students will need to interact deeply with a video (or two) in the course language as they produce the worksheets, which will provide them with a good amount of input in the language. As students select the graphic organizer(s) that they want to use for their worksheet(s) and make the key for their peers to use later in the Festival of Worksheets, they will watch and re-watch their selected (or assigned) video(s) many times, engaging deeply and meaningfully with input that you do not have to provide!

Then, during the actual Festival of Worksheets, students will compete to fill in the most complete details on their worksheets, using their classmates' keys, and amassing class points if a member of class finds details that are not listed on the answer key, to earn points towards a class reward like a game day or another treat). You will gasp in amazement as your students eagerly watch bunches of videos and interact with loads of language!

During the “Preparing the Worksheets” phase, students will watch comprehensible videos, select a graphic organizer that they think fits the information in the video, re-watch the video a few more times, using their

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selected graphic organizer to make an answer key, and (in upper-level classes) create a target-language script for the video.

My recommendations for sources of videos are Pablo Román’s Dreaming Spanish YouTube channel, or Alice Ayel’s YouTube channel, Kathrin Schectman's We Love Deutch website, or Diane Neubauer’s videos in Chinese. Of course, you could also use any video that is comprehensible to your students. If you have been making Video Retells of your class's stories throughout the year, you can use those as well. You can choose to either have the class watch its own videos, or, for a more challenging assignment, have one class work on another class’s videos.

“Dreaming Spanish”

“We Love Deutsch”

Alice Ayel

Diane Neubauer

End-of-the-year projects are generally more motivating when students work in partnerships. Since the goal is to keep students engaged as the year winds down, I recommend pairing them up. Myself, I tend to allow them to pick their own partners. This is more motivating to them, and it also gives me a way to encourage them to be on task during our work time. If I can say, “You can work with a friend as long as you keep each other on task and get your work done,” then I can use that to hold them accountable, with the “threat” of having to work on their own or switch to another partnership as the consequence for not working hard.

You can have partnerships select their own videos from a list of possibilities or assign the videos to them, perhaps differentiating with more-challenging videos for the more proficient students and more-familiar videos for the less-proficient. You can have them work with one video, or, to make the project last longer, have them work with two or three videos. Here is a sample of an assignment sheet for this project, made by my friend Ryann Campbell, a Spanish teacher in Washington.

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First, they will need to watch their video a few times and decide what kind of graphic organizer fits the content of the video best. Since the students will be taking notes in English (unless you are doing this project with more advanced students), I recommend English graphic organizers. The purpose of this activity is to have the students listen and understand, and so demonstrating their understanding in English is fine.

You might ask students to check in with you to show you their selected graphic organizer before they proceed further, to ensure that they have selected an appropriate organizer for their video.

To prepare for the Festival of Worksheets, have students watch their video(s) multiple times and fill in a blank organizer with all the possible answers that they think their classmates will find as they watch the video later.

To motivate them to watch their videos super-carefully, inform them that during the Festival of Worksheets, if

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their classmates on the other team find details that they missed, then their team will get a penalty point! More advanced classes can also make scripts that transcribe the content of the video. These scripts can become a useful tool for you to use with your classes next year. If you are using your own classes' Video Retells, you can have students subtitle the videos for future classes to enjoy.

You will most likely need to devote at least three class periods to the video viewing and creating the answer keys. If students are working with more than one video, you might need to devote more time than that to the preparation.

It’s all about getting the students to interact with language input that is not coming from your mouth, and setting up conditions that encourage multiple viewings of the same videos, to get repeated exposures to comprehensible language.

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End of the Year Option 2: The Word-Off

This project is one of the best things I stumbled upon in my years of teaching World Language. One, it gives us something fun to do and a big shared class goal to work towards, and two, it helps me integrate with my vocabulary-list-loving colleagues. There is one important caveat here. The Word Off is NOT a language acquisition activity. But it does make memorizing lists of words a whole lot more fun!

Basically, the Word-Off is like a spelling bee, but instead of spelling, students will translate vocabulary items from a list that they have worked with for a few weeks. Where do you get the vocabulary items? You can either get then from the required vocabulary lists that your department wants you to teach, or from a list that you brainstorm with your students.

Here is an example of a list that my friend Elena brainstormed with her students at Madison High School.

They first listed categories of vocabulary words and then gave her lists of words within those categories that they wanted to learn.

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Each week as you lead up to the Word-Off, you will work with a list of 12-18 vocabulary words. First, you will need a Quizziz account, or another online vocabulary application, to play with the terms. I like Quizziz because it has the “class score” feature. By using this feature, you can bypass the need to pre-teach the words. The students will effectively teach themselves the words as they play the Quizziz.

If you are using lists of vocabulary words from a textbook, you might be able to find pre-existing Quizzizes that are already made for you, using those words. If you are using lists of words that your students brainstormed. If the lists of words you are working with are not in Quizziz, you will have to set those up. You might have the students make the Quizzizes themselves one day in class. You will probably want to make a Quizziz yourself before having students do this, to practice, so you know how to lead them through the process.

When you introduce the Word-Off, you will want to tell students about the PRIZES! You can use whatever kinds of prizes you want, but I am pretty into bribing my students with food. The important thing is that there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes for each class as well as a Big Mega-Prize for the class with the highestscoring first-place winner. This would be the first-place winner rom all your classes who makes it to the

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highest number of rounds. Basically, this is a reward for the class who studies the words the most, because if the class goes to a very high number of rounds, then that means the competition was fierce and fewer students were eliminated in lower rounds.

Here are the prizes I offer: First place in the class: Bag of candy plus the opportunity to win the Class Prize (a pizza/donut party) Second place in the class: Small bag of candy Third place in the class: "Some" candy (basically some pieces of candy from a bigger bag) Fourth place in the class: Bragging Rights and Warn Fuzzy Feelings of Accomplishment I make a big poster and hang it in the hall to generate "buzz" about the upcoming Word-Off. Each week, leading up to the final Word-Off, we work with the words for the week. We start each little cycle of working with a new set of words on Friday. The best, fastest, easiest way I have found is the online game Quizziz. If you do not have access to technology, you can do a lot of different activities or games to start

working with the words — paper flashcards that you can use to play games, Charades, Pictionary, or any other vocabulary review game that you and your students like. But I like to take the path of least resistance and use Quizziz!

On Fridays, in the weeks leading up to the Word-Off, we use Chromebooks, go to the computer lab, or get kids on their own devices. I have a set of vocabulary words ready for them. These are either required words or words that they brainstormed as a class.

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I do not pre-teach the words; I just tell the class that we will play Quizziz until the class achieves a 75% or 80% (or higher, depending on your students) class average. This is why I like Quizziz, because it displays a class average, so that I can use it as the way for them to learn the words. We simply play the set over and over until we achieve the class goal. Students thus learn the words as they play. As they learn the words, the class average increases round after round. If a student scores very high more than one round in a row, I have them stand behind another student who wants a “coach” and I have the high-scoring student coach them, but no answer for them. This effectively turns them into study partners for other students.

Once we achieve the desired class average, I let them play a Quizziz that they like better than vocabulary, as an incentive. Searching in Quizziz for “top songs 2019” generally returns a set of questions that kids enjoy.

You can ask them for suggestions of topics they want to use as a reward. Sometimes we do not achieve the class average, and if not, that is OK, but we just do not get to play the more-enticing set of questions that day.

At the end of class, I give the class a sheet of the vocabulary in L1 (English for me) and L2 (French or Spanish for me) and tell them that they will help their class beat the other classes and get the pizza or donut party if they take some time to quiz themselves or each other outside of class.

Then the next Monday through Thursday, each day at the end of class or for a mid-class brain break, I do a “mini word-off”. I hold the class’s list of words (if I have multiple levels of classes, or if the kids brainstormed the words they want to work with, each class might have different words, but I just use that class’s list) and go down the list, asking for whole-class responses to the words.

On Monday and Tuesday, I give the L2 (French or Spanish for me) and ask them to call out the English. On Wednesday and Thursday, I give them the English and ask them to call out the L2. I tell them that if I get to a term for which the class’s response is hesitant or weak, I will back up to the first term and go back through them all, to give them a “running start” on the term that they were weak on. This encourages participation, as most kids do not like to hear things repeated; they like to make fast progress through lists. Basically, we are doing a flashcard-type review as a class, daily, for four days.

On Friday, we play another round of Quizziz with the next week's set of vocabulary words. I hand out another sheet with that week’s words plus the prior words, and encourage them to study so as to beat the other classes.

Then the next week, I work with the new words in class each day at the end of class or for a mid-class brain break. I will periodically mix in previous word lists, to keep them fresh on their minds. After about three or four sets of words, it is good to do a “practice word-off” with all the accumulated words and give a mini-prize to the first, second, and third place winners in the class.

After five or six weeks, the students will have memorized 60 to 90 or more words, and it is tine for the big Word-Off.

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To prepare for the day of the competition, you will need prizes for the first place, second place, and third place winners in each class (I gave a big bag of candy, a small bag of candy, and "some candy" to these kids) and a plan . to bring a class treat to the class whose first-place winner competed to the highest number of rounds in all your classes. I gave the first-place winner the option of a pizza party or a doughnut party for the class the next day. You can give whatever prizes you want, but I am not above motivating the youngsters with sugar and junk food.

Basically, the Word-Off is run like a spelling bee. I put the desks into rows, and then made a seating chart that had the rows on it. When the kids came in on the day of the Word-Off, I wrote their names in their spots. You could assign spots, but I figured what the hey, it's a celebration, and I let them sit wherever. I also had a group of six or eight chairs in the "Winners' Circle" for the last kids remaining in the last rounds to move to, to increase the suspense for all the kids who were already out of the competition.

To keep the "out" kids focused during the final rounds you could hand them a sheet of all the words in English, with blanks beside them, when the final kids are competing, and have a secondary competition with a minor prize like a fancy pencil or a cool sticker or a dip into the "prize bucket", for kids who get the most Spanish words filled in. In order to make it an incentive to listen, I suggest requiring them to write the number of the round in which the words were asked, beside the word, so that they do not just fill in the words they know, but instead actually listen to the competition.

I made a list of the words we had prepared and held them in my hand, in a random order, and began the competition. In once of my classes, I hd a heritage speaker of Spanish (heritage speakers in my school tended to go into the Dual Immersion program, so we did not have a large number of them in the "late entry" (which is to say, elective) Spanish classes. I asked him to hold another list of the words and make sure that his classmates' answers were correct.

If you have a large number of heritage speakers, you might have them do a separate competition with different words, or an actual spelling bee, or just give them the day to marvel at the late entry kids' struggles with basic-to-them vocab. Depends on your kids.

The first two rounds are "warm up" even though the answers still count. I say the word in Spanish or French and they respond with English. If a kid gets the word wrong, or cannot say the word in the time allotted (8 seconds is good), then I simply put an X over their name. In a "real" spelling bee, kids have to exit the "stage" but I figure that's kind of harsh. You could do it, though, if you are into the public humiliation factor!

I announce the round number as I begin the round, which means that I am back to the first kid in the first row, and then just go down the rows, calling on kids who are not yet "out." If I run out of words on the list, I just go back through and ask them again. (This is cool because kids end up hearing the words in English and Spanish over and over, so it is just another study session, if you really think about it.)

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It is important to keep track of the number of rounds the class competes through, because the first-place winner in the class that goes to the most rounds gets the Big Class Prize for the year. This prize is for ALL classes, at ALL levels, regardless of whether or not they were using the same vocabulary lists.

When we get to the end of the round in which there are only six or eight kids remaining, we switch to the "Winner's Circle" and all eyes are on the best word-offers. If you have a few students who just know EVERYTHING, then you might need to do what I did when Carmen and Elisa were competing in French a couple years ago.

It was getting close to the end of the period, and we were on Round 68, and they had literally gone through the whole list twice, and it was clear that no one would emerge the winner. So, in a stroke of teacher geniusborn-of-desperation, I said, "The final rounds include spelling. You must say the French word, then spell it correctly." This eliminated Elisa in . a few rounds, and Carmen was crowned the winner and scored a doughnut party for her class, because they went to the highest number of rounds.

Well, there you go! Fun times at the end of the year, and lots of vocab memorized without too much work on anyone's part. I hope you and your students like the Word-Off as much as we did!

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End of the Year Option 3: Story Book Projects This project is SUCH fun, as students take the lead and produce something of lasting value to your language program. Their task is to make a children’s book, in the course language, with illustrations and a glossary.

You willI support them by editing their drafts, working with them in class. I like to have them work in partnerships, which seems to help students be more creative, and feel more confident. It is also more fun to leave a legacy that you worked on with a friend. It is less intimidating, emotionally, to leave a book for next year’s classes, if you can share the “blame” with a friend.

Students generally really enjoy the opportunity to show off their language skills, and it is a community service to the students next year, as they will be leaving them a collection of fun children’s books for the free-choice reading library. They also enjoy the chance to have a more relaxed few weeks, working mostly in L1, drawing and coloring, and being creative.

A sample of the handout that I give my students and rubric to score their projects are provided below. Please note that the formatting is very small, especially for the handout. I would format this in a more readable way to hand out to my students.

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Story Book Project Instructions: With a partner, produce an illustrated storybook to put in our library.

1. Monday, May 15: Have your story written in rough draft form, in pen or pencil in your rough draft packet. You can choose a story we have created in class or make up your own. If you are doing a class story please see me because we do not want to duplicate the stories.

VERY IMPORTANT! Write in French or Spanish. DO NOT write in English and then expect to translate into French or Spanish; it is far too difficult to translate from English. Plus, these books will be read by beginners so your sentences should be simple and use words that you know. If you need to look a word up, here and there, it is OK but the majority of your writing should come from your own knowledge of Spanish.

As you work, keep a list of the words you have to look up because those are words that you will put in the illustrated glossary in step three.

The story must have the following parts.

Each part will become a page or two. Your writing will not fill up the page; it will be in a large sized font and contain an illustration. a. Description of the main character. 8 sentences long. Ideas: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age. b. Description of the setting and weather. 6 sentences long. Ideas: Planet, country, state, city, location in the city (store, house, restaurant, stadium, etc.), location in the location (table, counter, room in the house, etc.), weather, how the character feels about the weather. c. Description of another character whom they are with. 7 sentences long. Ideas: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age. d. Description of a problem for the character to solve. 8 sentences long. Ideas: What they want but do not have, they have to do something they dislike, someone up with a problem for them, they have to solve a mystery. e. Description of how they solve the problem. 10 sentences long. Ideas: They go to a new place, they learn a new skill, they meet a new person, they find something to help them. f.

Moral of the story. 2 sentences long. Ideas: What they learned, what the lesson is for the reader, a “saying” (You can look up an English saying, like “slow and steady wins the race” on Google, NOT Google Translate, but Google will give the best results (put the saying in quotes to get the best translation) or look up dicho in español or adage en français). g. “About the Authors” written in first person singular (I, me, mine) with 10 sentences about each author. “About the team” (Sobre el equipo en español or À propos de l’équipe en français) with 4 sentences about the two of you written in first person plural (We, us, our). Ideas: Your name, where you were born, what you like to do, what you do not like, your favorite classes/teachers, what you and your partner have in common, your advice for future students in this class 2. Wednesday, May 24: Illustrated pages with two to three sentences typed in at least 28 point font, and a large illustration with bold outlines and at least four colors. The illustrations MUST be your original work.

3. Wednesday, May 31: An illustrated glossary with the words that you had to look up. You should have at least 30 words in the glossary. Your glossary should include the French/Spanish and English translation and an illustration of the word with the French/Spanish in the illustration. The illustrations should each include three colors. They can be printed off Google image search if you like, or drawn. Then go back into the book and highlight the words that are found in the glossary. You can underline them or use a colored highlighter or marker to make them a different color.

4. Tuesday, June 6: A cover and title page. The cover should include the date in Spanish or French, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol, and a large illustration that uses at least five colors and is bold.

The illustration must be drawn by you.

5. Wednesday, June 7: Final copy due. You will put each page in a clear plastic sheet protector and a black project cover.

6. Thursday, June 8: Writing celebration and reading time, to share with the class and read other classes’ books.

Please plan to bring a snack. We will invite parents and others to come to our celebration of all you have learnt this year. I am so proud of your progress, and excited to share your creativity with next year’s classes.

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Classroom Library Books Project Publishing Company Name: ____________________________________________________ Employees and Job Titles:

____________________________________________________

Story A

B

C

D

Main character

Includes all of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job, and their age.

Includes six of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job, and their age.

Includes six of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job, and their age.

Includes four of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job, and their age.

Setting and Weather

8 sentences long.

Includes all of the following: Planet, country, state, city, location in the city (store, house, restaurant, stadium, etc.), location in the location (table, counter, room in the house, etc.), weather, how the character feels about the weather.

6 sentences long.

Includes six of the following: Planet, country, state, city, location in the city (store, house, restaurant, stadium, etc.), location in the location (table, counter, room in the house, etc.), weather, how the character feels about the weather.

4 sentences long.

Includes four of the following: Planet, country, state, city, location in the city (store, house, restaurant, stadium, etc.), location in the location (table, counter, room in the house, etc.), weather, how the character feels about the weather.

2 sentences long. Includes two of the following: Planet, country, state, city, location in the city (store, house, restaurant, stadium, etc.), location in the location (table, counter, room in the house, etc.), weather, how the character feels about the weather.

Second Character

Includes all of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age.

Includes six of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age.

Includes four of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age.

Includes two of the following: Name, nickname, physical description, personality description, likes and dislikes, what they want, their job their age.

Problem

Describes a problem.

Includes all of the following: the character’s feelings about it, and what they think and say about it.

Describes a problem.

Includes two of the following: the character’s feelings about it, and what they think and say about it.

Describes a problem.

Includes one of the following: the character’s feelings about it, and what they think and say about it.

Tells a problem. Does not include any of the following: the character’s feelings about it, and what they think and say about it.

Solution

Includes all of the following: They go to a new place, they learn a new skill, they meet a new person, and they find something to help them.

Includes three of the following: They go to a new place, they learn a new skill, they meet a new person, and they find something to help them.

Includes two of the following: They go to a new place, they learn a new skill, they meet a new person, and they find something to help them.

Includes one of the following: They go to a new place, they learn a new skill, they meet a new person, and they find something to help them.

Moral/ Lesson

The moral is two sentences long, fits with the story, and is an authentic real-life saying from French or Spanish.

The moral is two sentences long and fits with the story.

The moral is one sentence long and fits with the story.

The moral is does not fit with the story.

© 2018 The World Language Proficiency Project

!

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F

Artwork/Layout/Editing/Team Points A

B

C

D

Colors

You did all of the following: All of your artwork is outlined in black pen. Each page contains at least five colors. The colors are bold.Artwork fills the page.

You did three of the following: All of your artwork is outlined in black pen. Each page contains at least five colors. The colors are bold.Artwork fills the page.

You did two of the following: All of your artwork is outlined in black pen. Each page contains at least five colors. The colors are bold. Artwork fills the page.

You did one of the following: All of your artwork is outlined in black pen. Each page contains at least five colors. The colors are bold. Artwork fills the page.

Text

28 to 32 point font, arranged creatively and attractively on the page.

No more than four sentences per page.

28 to 32 point font, with not more than four sentences per page.

The font is too small or too large, with not more than four sentences per page.

The font is too small or too large and there are more than four sentences per page.

Language

Your language is simple.

Some of your sentences are short and others are long. You used connector words like and, but, or, then, that, and also. You asked me for a maximum of ten new words maximum.

Your language is simple. Some of your sentences are short and some are long. You asked me for a maximum of ten new words maximum.

Your language is simple.

You asked me for a maximum of ten new words maximum.

You asked for more than ten new words.

Definitions

Your glossary contains a maximum of ten words you had to look up, plus 16 words that you think might be hard for beginners, are defined in the glossary.

Your glossary contains a maximum of ten words you had to look up, plus 12 words that you think might be hard for beginners are defined in the glossary.

Your glossary contains a maximum of ten words you had to look up, plus 12 words that you think might be hard for beginners are defined in the glossary.

Your glossary contains a maximum of ten words you had to look up, plus 6 words that you think might be hard for beginners are defined in the glossary.

Glossary

Your glossary contains all of the following: highlighted or underlined the words in your book and included a definition in English and a colorful illustration with at least three colors per drawing.

Your glossary contains all of the following: highlighted or underlined the words in your book and included a definition in English and an illustration.

Your glossary is missing one of the following: You highlighted or underlined the words in your book and included a definition in English and an illustration.

Your glossary is missing more than one of the following: You highlighted or underlined the words in your book and included a definition in English and an illustration.

Cover

Cover includes all of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a large illustration that uses at least five colors and is bold.

Cover is missing one of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a large illustration that uses at least five colors and is bold.

Cover is missing two of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a large illustration that uses at least five colors and is bold.

Cover is missing three of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a large illustration that uses at least five colors and is bold.

Title Page

The title page includes all of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a hand-drawn team logo (which may be in black and white)

The title page is missing one of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a handdrawn team logo (which may be in black and white)

The title page is missing two of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a hand-drawn team logo (which may be in black and white)

The title page is missing two of the following: the month and year, the authors’ names, the name of the team with a copyright symbol and the year, and a handdrawn team logo (which may be in black and white)

Editing

You had the teacher check your work. There are only one or two sentences with errors in your final draft.

You had the teacher check your work. There are three to five sentences with errors in your final draft.

You had the teacher check your work. There are six to eight sentences with errors in your final draft.

You had the teacher check your work. There are more than eight sentences with errors in your final draft.

Team Points Teacher Words

© 2018 The World Language Proficiency Project

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F

You used an online translator.

Introduction to the Best Project Ever

The Storybook Project is, for me, the best way to spend the last few weeks of school. I love seeing my students engaged in a creative project and using language. Having an authentic audience (next year’s kids) is a big motivator, especially for kids who have been reading previous classes' library books all year.

This project usually takes my students about three weeks to complete. This is because I want to give them all the time they need to complete the work in class. I am a firm believer in doing projects in class, because it helps to level the playing field.

Some kids have calm home environments with all the supports and parents who push them academically, who have the financial and personal resources to be available during homework time, and who make sure the kids have space, materials, and adult support and supervision to complete their homework. Other kids, oftentimes the ones who most need to build successful feelings about school, have more unpredictable and less-supportive home lives, in which the adults are not always available to make sure that they have what they need to complete their work at home. So I provide enough class time for this project, or any long-term project, to be completed with my support and supervision, and with materials available to do a good job. I want my students to do a GREAT JOB so that I have lots of awesome books for the library next year!

Acquiring Supplies Here are the recommended supplies that have served my students well and created books that have held up for years in my class library.

Black report covers It is best if you have a consistent “look” and they are all the same color. I find black is the nicest-looking color.

You will need one for each partnership, so half of your total number of students.

Non-glare sheet protectors Non-glare is important to me as it gives a more professional “matte” look. Each book will need at least 9 sheet protectors, including the cover and glossary. So you will need to do some multiplication.

Black Flair (or other medium felt tip) pens for outlining the illustrations It makes the books look so much nicer when the drawings have black outlines.This is totally worth the investment.

Bonus: Markers and Colored Pencils If you have the funds, get the best markers and pencils you can afford, since awesome art supplies can make

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kids very excited about the artwork! Just an aside: woodless colored pencils are so much nicer than the kind with wood on them.You might just switch permanently!

About three to four weeks before you plan to start the Books Project, I recommend that you ask students to bring in a class donation of $2.00 to $5.00, if this is an appropriate ask for your school community. I have found that I get much more response when I send home an excited note with some pictures and examples of what we have made in past years, and also give families the option of choosing from “giving categories” like these:

We’re Doing a

Service Learning Project!

Will You Please Be a Class Helper? $2.00 — Class Helper: You are helping to cover the cost of the cover and sheet protectors for the children’s book your child will produce. Thank you! $5.00 — Class Hero: You are helping to cover the cost of markers and colored pencils for the whole class. Thank you! $10.00 — Class Sponsor: You are helping to cover the materials cost for someone who cannot bring in a donation at this time.

(If you have a community that has the means, you might add the following donation category.) $20.00 — Class Benefactor: You are helping to purchase other books and reading material so that next year our class library will be even better!

If you cannot ask your students’ families for donations, you might look into Donors Choose, if you are a publicschool teacher. I have used Donors Choose many times in the past, to fund this project as well as many other fun ideas.

Introducing the Books Project -- A sample of what I tell my students OK, class, I am super-stoked for this announcement. We are going to get started on Classroom Library Books for next year. These are partner projects. You and your partner are going to write, illustrate and produce a story book for next year’s 7th graders. We’ll put them in the library for them to read during their 10 minute reading time.

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On Tuesday (Note: usually it takes 2-3 days of class time if you devote about 35-40 minutes per day), you are going to have your story written in rough draft form in pen or pencil in your rough draft packet. You see what your rough draft packet looks like? See? Very fancy, it’s paper….that is made into a packet.

In your rough draft packet you will have to VERY IMPORTANT, write in Spanish. Don’t write in English and translate later. It is far too difficult to translate. Plus, these books are gonna be read by beginners, so they should be simple and mainly use words that you know. This is very important — if you ever need to ask me for a word here and there that’s OK, but the almost every word of your content should come from your own knowledge of Spanish.

I insist on this because it is very IMPORTANT. As you work you have to keep a list of the words we have to look up on the back of your paper, because those are the words you will be putting in your illustrated glossary.

In the final book, you will highlight those words so that 7th graders next year can be sure they can rely on you to teach the terms that you had to look up.

These are the parts of the story.

You need to have a character, a setting, including the weather, another character, a problem, how the problem is solved, and the moral of the story at the end.

And then you are going to have a section called “Sobre el Equipo” (about the team) that tells about you and your partner, so the kids next year can know who write these amazing books!

Let me give you some advice for making your character.

When you draw your character and your secondary character you wanna be sure that they are really simply drawn.Some of us are really great artists and can make very complicated drawings. But you don’t want to do something very complicated because on every single page, you are going to draw a picture of this character so on every single page you have to replicate the same look and design of the character. So, if you make your character really complicated, that is your choice, but I let you know that that may involve working some hours after school. If you wanna keep it simple and make a kind of comic book style, that is usually the best.

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Here is an example of a cover with three nice, simple characters. Notice in the picture below how many times these writers ended up drawing these characters, and this is not even the entire book! So they were probably really happy by the end, that they had made their characters simple!

Also, part of your grade is that it your book is colorful and fun to look at. So today when you draw a prototype of your character, you need to make sure that your character has at least four colors in it, and you must outline them in black pen.

You see this box of black pens here? We are probably going to go through a whole box of these pens over the last few weeks because we are going to be outlining everything in black pen.

Everything looks way better, and more professional, when you outline everything in black pens. This is a piece of advice you should take to every other class. Every time you outline your drawings with black pen, you have a much better look in your drawings.

Getting the Character - Students’ First Step

First we will imagine our characters: who they are, and what they look like. Once we have interesting characters, it is easier to plan out the plot of the story and send them on a simple little adventure.

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Here is a sheet (found below) that will help you to plan your characters. You might not use ALL this information in your story, but it is good to know your characters deeply, like they are actually real, before writing the plot. It helps you to write more realistically.

Main character You will either begin with the words or the drawing. It is your choice as a writer. For the drawing you will use at least four colors outlined in black pen. For the description, you can use these words I gave you or other words that you know. Use words you KNOW, and if you need a word or two extra, you can ask me, and put them in your glossary.

Drawing: Four colors Outlined in black pen Voici __ le/la __ Il/Elle s’appelle __ Il/Elle a __ ans/mois/jours/heures/minutes Sa famille est ___ Il/Elle a un frère/une soeur/un père/ une mère Son frère/père s’appelle/ Sa soeur/mère s’appelle Il/Elle aime __ Il/Elle adore __ Il/Elle n’aime pas ___ Il/Elle déteste ___ Il/Elle travaille pour une compagnie qui s’appelle __ C’est une compagnie de __ Sa poste est / Son boulot est / Son titre est __ Il/Elle a peur de ___ (scared) Il/Elle veut __ Son plus grand secret est ___ Son surnom est ___ / Ses amis l’appellent __

Secondary/sidekick/enemy character.

Drawing: Four colors Outlined in black pen Son (meilleur/meilleure) ami/Son amie __

Son ennemi (favori) __

Same informations as main character.

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Developing the Plot - Students’ Second Step You need to establish and describe a setting, including the weather, and then introduce a problem, tell how how the problem is solved, include the characters talking or thinking, and write the moral of the story at the end. Here are some words for you to use for ideas to plan out the plot of the book. You will expand on this when you write your rough draft.

You can use some of these words to help you plan, or any other words that you know. Use words you KNOW, and if you need a word or two extra, you can ask me, and put that in your glossary.

1. Setting Il fait (The weather is __) __ est à ___( __ is in (town/city) __ est à la maison / au boulot / dans son école / chez __ (__ is at home / at work / at school / at __'s house) 2. Problem Il n'est pas content / Elle n'est pas contente (He/She/They is/are not happy) Il/Elle veut / Il/Elle a besoin de / Il/Elle pense / Il/elle préférerait (He/She/They wants, needs, thinks, would prefer) Il/Elle regarde / pense / dit / crie / pleure (He/She /They looks at, thinks, says, yells, cries) 3. Solution Il voit / décide / pense à / va / rencontre / lit (He/She/They sees, decides, thinks of, goes, meets, reads) Il/Elle regarde / pense / dit / crie / sourit / rit (He/She/They looks at, thinks, says, yells, smiles, laughs) 4. Moral La morale de l'histoire est (The moral of the story is) Il vaut mieux (It is better to) Nous devons / On doit (We should) Quelquefois dans la vie (Sometimes in life) Il est important de (It is important to) __ a appris / vu / su /découvert (__ learned / saw / found out /discovered) Maintenant __ sait (Now __ knows) Dorénavant __ sera / saura (From here on out __ will be / will know)

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Happy Times for Kids and Teachers On Facebook every spring, the Book Projects start just rolling in left and right. I am so so happy when I see posts like these! This is why I love this project -- happy kids being creative and learning about project management and working together to serve the school community, their teachers relaxing into a support role, and classroom libraries getting filled with kid-friendly, kidcreated books!

The Writing and Editing Process To make your life easier, it is important to lay down some procedures for students to follow when creating the pages that you will edit. You should NOT edit the rough, handwritten draft. I ask students to handwrite the rough draft so that they are forced to rely on the language that they have in their actual heads. But then when they type into Google Docs, they will often see their errors and correct them, themselves, before bringing the printed-out second drafts to us for editing. This cuts down significantly on the edits you will need to make!

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Here are the rules I share with my classes. If they bring me work that did not follow these guidelines, then I just send them back to work more until it is acceptable. I only edit work that is ready to edit, in that they have followed the requirements below, designed to help me keep the process manageable.

1. They must not put more than four sentences per page.

2. The sentences must be typed in at least 28 point font.

3. They must print out the pages and bring them to me for editing.

(Note: Some may say this wastes paper, and prefer to edit on the screen. Personally, I use so little paper throughout the year, and I rarely ask my students to consume significant amounts of paper, so I do not worry too much about having them print the pages. I like them to print the pages JUST LIKE they will look in the final book, so that I can quickly edit, because the words are in a large font, and also because I can doublecheck that they have paginated, or divided up the text into pages, in a way that makes sense.)

4. They must not use Google Translate unless it is to look up a word or two here and there.

5. They must bring me two pages at a time to edit. Then when they bring me the next pages, they must show me the two pages I just edited, with their illustrations completed, using black pen to outline the illustrations and at least five colors per page, inserted into a sheet protector.

6. They must sit with me, with their writing partner, and talk about their edits. (This sometimes will have the effect of reducing the number of tines I have to correct the same thing in their later pages.

Of course, error correction being what it is -- not all that effective at changing writing behavior -- this is not always the case. But, every once in a while, they actually remember something I showed them, so I guess it saves me a little time.)

If students do not do one of the requirements listed above, I simply do not edit their work. I glance over it, and if they have not followed the directions above, I do not do any editing. I just hand their work back to them and tell them whet they failed to do to prepare their work for editing. Then I make them go back and do what I said, then get back in line.

I do sometimes have a line of several partnerships lined up at one time, waiting to get their work edited. While they are in line, I ask them to look over each other's pages and see if THEY can find anything that needs to be changed.

To be honest, if kids bring me typed-up versions of their super-simple handwritten drafts, in 28+ point font, with four or fewer sentences per page, and sit with me as I edit, it does not feel like too much of a chore. I simply set up "camp" and it becomes sort of a bonding experience with the kids, as I get their stories in

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installments, and tell them, "I can't wait to see what happens on the next two pages!” when I send them off to illustrate the two pages I looked over, and prepare the next two typed pages for me to edit, when they return to the editing line.

Sending them back to do the illustrations between rounds of editing helps space my workload out, and gives students achievable, small goals, so they (and I) know if they are on track to finish. I like to use a grid with the steps listed and check them off as students complete the tasks, so I can see at a glance who is not progressing at the same rate as the rest of the class, and intervene to support/encourage/problem-solve with those partnerships. And asking them to use five colors and black outlines makes them have to actually invest some time into the process.

Sometimes, I have a line of kids waiting to be edited at the end of a class period, so I might make a little pile of papers and look over them during prep time. If I do not have the time, I just tell them to wait until tomorrow.

I do not want to pile myself with loads of out-of-class editing, though, so I do not do this every day of the project.

Some teachers require kids to do some "sponge" activities while they wait for their turn to be edited. Others also add the requirement that there can only be three groups waiting at one time, in line at the "editing station" so that the room maintains a calmer atmosphere.

Myself, I kind of enjoy the "happy work buzz" of people milling about and working productively, so I just let nature generally take its course.

The Sto ry of “M an-Ma n”

Here's another little tip: I did not really do too much editing in the glossaries or the "About the Team" (the authors) pages. I figured it is the kids writing about themselves, and if they make some mistakes, well, so be it. Life's too short! You might be more into editing those parts than I was, but I think my kids were not too badoff having to occasionally read some pages written by other kids that contained a few errors.

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At the end of the process, students will assemble their final books, and I like to have a writing celebration in which we read and enjoy each other’s books, and perhaps have some cookies and punch. You can have groups present their books, or have them pass the books around and read in their partnerships. One fun way to acknowledge each other’s work is to have readers use sticky notes to leave compliments about the characters, plot, and/or artwork in the books they read.

I like to make a big to-do about how proud I am of their hard work, and then have a “Putting the Books in the Library” ceremony. If you do this project year after year, and your students have read previous classes’ books during Free-Choice Reading, then your students will, most likely, be quite excited to see their work join the books they have been enjoying all year up till this point, that were left for them by your former classes in years past.

It is a big moment, and a fantastic close to a happy and productive year.

Plus, you get a ton of books! Look at this haul from my classes a few years ago!

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End of the Year Option 4: Class Yearbook This project creates a lasting artifact that students may cherish for years to come. In my AP English class, we were a tightknit bunch, and sometimes a little goofy and naughty. Inside jokes flew all over, oftentimes inappropriate, about the salacious content of some of the Shakespeare plays and other literature we were reading. And at the end of the year, led by Lydia, who had, sitting quietly in class, sketched all of us throughout the year, a group of us worked secretly, drawing and writing under our desks, to create a class yearbook containing all her drawings and the inside jokes and messages to each other.

Somehow we convinced our teacher to put together printed, laminated copies for each kid in class, and the day that we distributed these to the others and all laughed and signed each other’s books was one of the highlights of the whirlwind graduation season. A lot of the pomp and circumstance of graduation seemed hollow and formulaic. But the day when we reminisced and laughed over our shared experience that year was a real experience of community that has stuck with me ever since.

When I cooked up the idea to do a Class Yearbook Project with my kids, it was with this meaningful experience in mind. Our goal is to create an artifact for each student to take with them, to remember the community that they built with us this year. On one of the last days of school, students will receive a printed copy with signature pages at the end, and sign each other’s yearbooks.

To create the books, we write class pages and partner pages. Each of these processes is explained below.

Class Yearbook Pages To make a class yearbook page, we write together in class. I sometimes add more students’ information later. However, I do not aim to get everyone a mention on every page. That is not how normal yearbooks work; we appear here and there throughout the book, sometimes in words, sometimes in pictures, sometimes both.

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I recommend devoting one or two days a week in the final months of school to writing class yearbook pages.

Like a normal yearbook, each page has a theme. You can select from this list, use your own ideas, or brainstorm topics with your students. If your class has particular inside jokes, you can make those your topics.

Generally, my goal is to create four to ten different pages over the course of about a month and a half to two months.

Fall Sports Highlights / Spring Sports Highlights Lunchroom Highlights Drama Highlights

(the theatrical variety, NOT the interpersonal kind!)

Our Trip to the Shakespeare Festival Places We Visited P.E. Highlights When We Were 4 Years Old Predictions in 10 Years Predictions for Next Year What Was Popular This Year / Time Capsule “Last Will and Testament” (especially with seniors/8th graders)

There are several ways to elicit the information for the pages. I suggest varying your approach because it helps maintain interest.

Here are some options: (1) Ask students to write their answer to a question related to the topic on a small piece of paper and hand that in. I have them write in English, so they can be more honest and creative.

(2) Ask students to bring in a photo related to the topic, either one that they have hanging around on their phone, or one they take special for the page.

You might not get photos from everyone, but that is also authentically how producing a yearbook works.

(3) Ask students to draw a picture related to the topic. These are not just simple sketches; the pictures will be part of the page.

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(4) Take a class survey and tally the results on the board, and then use the survey as a jumping-off point to include individual students’ details.

(5) You might have your class artist draw pictures of what the class is discussing as you write. These pictures can be incorporated into the layout of the page.

Writing the pages is like Write and Discuss but the content is being discussed and written for the first time as the writing is happening. Here is a video of my class writing a page together a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/THqcdqu0isM Because the writing takes longer than your typical Write and Discuss, you will most likely need to give the class something to do in addition to listening and discussing for twenty to thirty minutes.

They might make illustrations as they listen and discuss, or they might write down 5 useful phrases (to be used when they are writing their partner’s page), or they might look for 3 “pull quotes” from the text that you generate can be used as “call outs”.

First, it is a good idea to write a couple of introductory sentences. You might lead with a question or a short narrative segment. If you can begin the narrative segment with someone talking or thinking, or with a specific, concrete action, or a rhetorical question, you may be surprised at how professional your writing sounds.

For example, on a page called Lunchroom Highlights: Starting with a question: What is your favorite period of the day? Most students say “Lunch!” Our cafeteria is a fun place.

Starting with action: A table sings “Happy Birthday” very loudly to a friend in the cafeteria. The whole school starts singing. Our

cafeteria is a fun place.

Then, to transition into the rest of the page, pull one of the students’ pictures or answers, or ask details of one of the students who responded to the survey. This part of the process is like Student Interviews (explained below) combined with Write and Discuss. First, write the fact that the student has provided. Then ask the student a few follow-up questions and add a sentence or two to the paragraph. Then move on to another student.

I do not recommend doing class yearbook pages day after day after day, but rather doing one every week or so. By the end of the year, you can have four to six built up if you start now! Added to the partner pages (explained below), which take about three days of class time, you can get

a nice yearbook put together in time for the last days of school, when you can have a yearbook signing party for a period or a half-period.

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Partner Yearbook Pages These are individual pages that students write and illustrate about a partner. In making these pages, you have an opportunity to teach about how to use the computer to write things that we need to look up.

First, you will need to have students generate the content about their partner. They will interview their partner and generate two images of their partner — one “head shot” and one “action shot.”

I let my students conduct the interviews in their stronger shared language(s). This way, they get more accurate information from their partner, whose ability to respond in the course language may be limited. In upper-level classes, you might have them interview each other in the language.

I think it is ideal to provide the questions in the course language with my own answers (or the answers of a well-liked staff member at the school) written in the course language, so that students can use the answers as a scaffold to understand the questions later when they are interviewing their partner.

You can use any questions, but these are a good starting place.

1. What was your favorite class this year?

Ms. Hargaden says that her favorite class this year was French, or maybe Spanish. She can’t decide.

2. What was your favorite project this year?

She says that her favorite project was the Word-Off.

3. Who were your best friends this year?

Her best friends are Ms. Overvold and Ms. Blackford.

4. What was the best day of the year?

The best day of the year for her was the day when we went outside and did a Running Dictation.

5. What is the best food in the cafeteria?

She thinks that the food in the cafeteria is generally gross, but she likes the salad bar.

6. Who was your favorite teacher this year?

Her favorite teacher is her yoga teacher, Gretchen.

7. What activities did you do at school this year?

She played kickball in the Teacher Kickball Tournament. She sang in the Talent Show.

8. What activities did you do outside of school this year?

She went to yoga class and visited China.

9. What school are you going to next year?

She is changing schools. She is going to the School of Teacher Training.

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10. What is your advice for next year’s seventh grade?

Her advice for the seventh graders next year is listen to Mr. Kim, always do your homework, and do not share your locker combination.

11. What is the strangest thing that happened this year?

The strangest thing that happened to Ms. Hargaden this year was when she got lost on the way to school because she was thinking about something else.

12. What is the best / worst thing that happened to you this year?

The best thing that happened to her this year was having awesome students!

The worst thing that happened to her this year was having to move rooms two times!

Before the students get to work interviewing their partner, you can provide more input by talking about your (prepared) answers. In order to make the answers comprehensible, you might act them out or do a quick Visual Story or bring in a photo or use some other kind of scaffolding. Then at the end of that class period, students interview their partners and write their answers.

A Note on Technology In order to write the page in the course language, students may need to look some words up. This is fine; using technology to assist our writing is a skill that everyone needs these days. Sometimes we need to ask our students to produce writing without recourse to reference materials and at other times, so we can get a clear picture of the language that is developing inside their heads, and at other times we can help them learn to write with the support of technology. This is, actually, a much more authentic writing task. Myself, as a nonnative speaker of the languages I teach, I often use the online tools referenced below to help me when I compose writing, to learn new words or just to double-check my phrasing.

I like to teach my students some ways to use the internet wisely. One thing that we all need to know as language teachers is that Google Translate is actually getting really accurate. You can read more about the reasons why here.

I pasted three of my own responses into Google Translate just to test this out, and they actually came back in almost-perfect, idiomatic French with just the slightest whiff of artificial intelligence.

Myself, I do not think this is anything to hide from our students. Knowledge is power, and we cannot really keep anything from anyone anymore anyway, because they can find out anything they want with the click of a button.

What students do need to know is how to verify the results of Google Translate. I like to make sure that words I **think** I know actually mean what I envision. A great way to do that is to take an unknown word from the translation and put it in to Google Image Search, and see what comes up. For instance, if students are unsure

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if “casier” actually means “locker” they can put that into the image search and quickly see a whole bunch of images that verify that, indeed, that word is accurate. See? Another quick trick they can do is to take a meaningful clause out of the translation, put it in quotes, and Google it. If it returns a lot of hits, then it is a pretty sure bet that it is actually something that a person would type.

Another trick is to teach them to use the site Linguee to see possible ways to say things. This site is amazing because it pulls up examples of the phrase you want, from many, many published sources. I love using it to help me, as a non-native speaker, find new turns of phrase that I have never thought of using. The trick is to put the phrase you want in quotation marks so it searches for that exact phrase, and to play around with multiple ways to phrase it in English if the first search does not return good results.

For instance, I put in “best day of the year” and got no exact matches, but when I shortened it to “best day of” I got many examples of that phrase, said several different ways. This is a valuable learning tool, because many language students tend to think that there is “one way” to say something, when in reality there are usually many ways a proficient speaker might express that thought.

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Here are just a few ways to express this idea in French. Please note that, far from “cheating,” using language from a real, culturally-authentic, meaningful context like this actually forces students to interact with the language in a very focused way, and thus is actually contributing to their language acquisition. le plus beau jour de ma vie sa meilleure journée passée sur le rallye la journée a été la plus belle de toute ma vie la plus belle journée de votre vie

Editing the Partner Pages You might ask students to let you look over their pages with them so you can give them feedback. I find this much more efficient than taking them home to correct. As I work through the pages with them, I can point things out about what I am correcting.

I suggest only allowing students to bring you four sentences at a time for editing. I would expect them to then go make the changes I suggest, then write the next four sentences, print them out, and bring them to me later.

This cuts down on the line of kids waiting for you to look over their work.

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If a student brings you a page that is a total mess, because they went totally “off the farm” and used Google Translate to spit out convoluted sentences that you cannot understand, I suggest that you stop editing it, ask them to go back, simplify, use Google Images, check the internet for examples of phrases, and use Linguee. I feel like if kids are going to be so lazy as to not do any of this checking before bringing you their writing, then it is not your job to sit down and try to make sense of their strange sentences! This is another great reason to ask them to bring you their writing in small batches, so you can catch these lazy kids early and coach them to work harder before calling their writing “done enough to edit.”

Once the writing is done, the students will need to make images of their partner. One of these images is a “ headshot” like a school picture and the other is an “ action shot” showing their partner doing something referenced in the Q and A. I want my students to stretch themselves to be creative when they do work like this. So, I would not not allow them to just plop a photo of their partner into the page. They can either sketch their partner from life, or from their imagination. If they are artistically challenged, I encourage them to use a device to take a picture of their partner and use the “Cell Phone Light Box Tracing Trick.” This trick is LIT. Literally, it is LIT, by the light of the phone or (even better) iPad or other tablet. They simply pull the picture of their partner up on their device, place a piece of blank paper over it, and trace the outlines of the photo onto their paper. They can then use the tracing to draw over and color in. This little trick can also be done by printing the image on paper and taping it to a window to do the tracing.

Then have students upload their images to the Google Doc that they are producing for the yearbook.

You might want to ask the students to name their document using a standardized format (for example: Period 1 Yearbook André Miller) so that you can cut and paste them into one big document that you can send to the printer and staple into yearbooks (with the addition of a cover and a couple of pages for signatures during the Yearbook Signing Party).

The cover can be simple or complex. You might have students who finish early work together to design a cover for the yearbook. This makes a nice “sponge” activity for students who turn in their pages early.

Well, from a former high-school newspaper and yearbook editor, HAPPY YEARBOOKING!

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Below, you will find a sample assignment sheet for this project from my friend Nissa Quill, a French teacher from Maryland, which shows how you can modify and adjust this project for your own needs, followed by an explanation of Student Interviews.

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AP Final Project: THE CLASS YEARBOOK Task: To create a Yearbook about the many memories you have gathered as a High School Student.

In French, you will write a summary about your High School memories. 5 of the 18 categories listed below must be included. You must write at least 150 words per category.

Freshman Year

Sophomore Year

Junior Year

Senior Year

Sports/Clubs/Activities

Parties

Special School Events

Teachers/School Staff

Goals for the future

Anecdotes/Personal Stories

Good Times

Bad Times

Special Friends

Favorite Class(es)

After-school jobs/Activities/Responsibilities What we Wore

Music We Loved

*If there is another category you wish to write about let me know.*

Your finished work must also include: (1) A tasteful and appropriate decorative cover (2) A table of contents (3) A dedication page (min. 50 words)

Student Interviews Student interviews are a powerful way to ramp up the interest level in class, because suddenly students take center stage in a way they have not yet done in class.

Social learning is a powerful motivating factor for children and adolescents, and how fortunate for us that it just so happens to mesh perfectly with the language goals that Novice and Intermediate students have - to communicate on topics of personal importance.

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For the interview, a student takes the stage for the entire Guided Oral Input session - about 15 minutes of class time - and you just ask them questions. These questions can be asked from a list (samples are provided at the end of this section) or you can make them up as you go. Many teachers find it comforting to start with a list and then add in questions that come up as you work with the pre-planned questions. I do not always go in the same order, because I want to keep things feeling fresh, but having that list does help you to feel grounded as you begin the activity.

Some teachers have the class take notes on the proceeding, giving quizzes at the end of the interview. You can also give “cumulative” quizzes over a batch of interviews, to keep the first ones fresh on students’ minds, and to reinforce the information and language used in previous interviews.

Do not force every single student to participate in an interview. At first, I recommend asking for volunteers. As students are interviewed, you can cross them off the class list. I have found it helps to do a few interviews of the first volunteers and then ask the students to write me a note on a small slip of paper at the end of class one day, to let me know if they want to be interviewed alone or with a partner.

As you pass out the papers, you can invite students who do not want to be interviewed to write a sentence to say that they do not, and tell them that you will give them an opportunity for independent make-up work on their own time at home. I do this so that those who are truly petrified of being interviewed have an opportunity to decline, but so that those who simply do not want to participate have to truly think about whether or not they will want to do the make-up work.

Then, working privately with the students who declined, probably during reading time, I give them the make-up work that is very easy -providing their own information for their page in the Class Yearbook, in English, which I translate for the book. I have the artists or other volunteers illustrate their page based on their responses. I do not make this option very public, because I want only students who truly are not emotionally ready to be interviewed to choose it. Student interviews work best when we’re “all in it together” and so I want to make sure that only those students who are truly anxious or in need of accommodations are choosing to not participate.

If a student opts to be interviewed with a partner, that simply means that they sit in the Special Chair and have their partner sit beside them to offer moral support. Many students appreciate that friendly presence beside them at the front of the room.

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Here is Jody Noble’s description of the original “Special Chair”: “When my friend, Beth, gave up teaching to live a life of sanity and happiness outside the classroom, she left me her teacher chair. It was really a stool with a chair back. It was tall and kind of cool looking. It changed my life. Whenever I decide to do this activity, I ask the children if they would like to answer some questions. It is not mandatory, but rarely does a child refuse.

The chair has rules, of course: 1. No dissing of the person in the chair, not ever, no way, no how.

2. You do not have to tell the truth while sitting in the chair. It’s up to you.

3. People may disagree with you, but they may not change your mind. Only you do that.

4. You have the final word and then Profe has the final word after that.

5. You may only do what you are told to do or risk being replaced by the next lucky person.

“If you think they follow the rules just because the rules are explicitly stated, you would be mistaken. We practice them and practice them and practice them. Much modeling, much “replay” when mistakes are made, much elation and praise when rules are followed. Emotional SAFETY is my #1 concern. Below are some student reflections about the chair. I got a beautiful peek into what their experience in Spanish class has been like. They think it’s the chair!

Colin: All of the attention is on you. (Me: Is that always a good thing?) YES. Omar: When you go up there (on the chair), you wonder what’s going to happen. It’s exciting when it’s like that – like a mystery.

Ellie: We don’t have the chair in any other class. It reminds us of when we were little and when we got to do “make believe”.

Jeannie: You don’t have to tell the truth when you are sitting on the chair if you don’t want to; and that is really fun. People don’t really argue with you and make you stay in reality. I like that. I also like that my teacher makes all her questions clear – she always does that, no matter what we are talking about.

Anna: After class, I can’t remember if we were speaking Spanish or English. I am not aware.

It’s weird, but cool. I just “know” what we talked about.

Alex: When you sit in it, it turns into a magical, wonderful chair.

Cameron: When you’re on the chair, it makes you feel powerful.”

Asking Questions You can ask the questions in the course language, using gestures and the board to scaffold their understanding, but if a student answers in a stronger language, that is fine, and very much expected at this level, especially in a situation where all eyes are on them. You simply restate their answer in the course language, establish meaning for anything that might not be comprehensible, and continue.

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After each answer, except maybe to the most basic of questions such as “what is your name”, it is recommended that you spend some time marveling at the student’s amazing answer. This is theatre, and much like the attitude that you assumed during Card Talk - absolute wonder at the amazing students we have in our classes.

If you truly think about it, on a deep level, we should be marveling at our students’ uniqueness, for none of them is exactly like any other student we will ever encounter in our lives. And each one has the potential for causing immense good in this world, or immense suffering for that matter. Treating each and every interaction like a precious opportunity to shape the future, and thus pouring as much admiration and positive regard into each interaction with our students, on and off the Special Chair, is the heart and soul of what education should be.

Building up our students, being the conduit for the class to experience the unique and worthy and amazing people that they truly are, is big, important work in teaching. Insisting on absolute respect from the class, for each and every student, helps shape our classroom communities into safe havens for our students to appreciate each other for their individuality, and for us to feel part of a group that is special - a place of listening, sharing, and being known and accepted for who we truly are. Is that not one of our greatest wishes as human beings?

Jody laid the groundwork for this very engaging and community-building communicative teaching strategy, and many teachers after her have continued with this idea, adapting it to their classrooms and personalities. Specific strategies that are based on the Special Chair include the work of Bryce Hedstrom (La Personal Especial) and Sabrina Janczak (Star of the Week).

Kid Quiz Notebook During the interview, it is a good idea to have your artists sketch the student being interviewed, on a piece of chart paper, either their face/head or their whole body, with symbols and drawings around them to show the things that they said during the interview. You can also have the Quiz Writer or the Story Writer keep notes on the students who are interviewed.

I like to keep these notes in a special notebook called the Kid Quiz Notebook. Each student has their own page in the notebook in the order in which they were interviewed. At the top of the page the writer notes the student’s name and the date of the interview, and then writes in bullet points all the information that was learned about the student.

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You can use the Kid Quiz Notebook to give periodic Quick Quizzes on the previously-interviewed students. I like to ask a total of eight to ten questions. The first four or five questions are about the most recentlyinterviewed student. Then the next two or three questions are on the second-most-recently-interviewed student. For the rest of the questions, I flip back to previous students’ pages, randomly selecting students from past interviews and asking questions from their pages. This ensures that the students who were interviewed in the past continue to get “exposure” in the quizzes.

You might want to make a note of the date that they were used in a quiz, at the top of their page to denote that they have been used again in a quiz, so that you can keep track of who has not been mentioned in a while. Like any content from class, the information gained from student interviews and written in the Kid Quiz Notebook can be used to create reading and listening assessments.

On the following pages, you will find sample lists of questions that can be used for student interviews. The first list is modified from Anne Matava’s questionnaire and the second list gives selected questions from Bryce Hedstrom’s La Persona Especial handout. Bryce’s list is much longer than the scope of this section allows, but it available in many languages, for free download at his website, www.brycehedstrom.com.

Student Interview Questions (based on Anne Matava’s Student Questionnaire) Name/Nickname

Birthday

The birthday you wish you had

Names and ages of siblings

Town you were born in

Other places you have lived

Pets and their names

Your favorite things to do

Your job (If you don’t have one make it up)

Instruments, sports, or games that you play

Sports players, artists, or musicians whom you admire

A celebrity whom you find attractive

Your favorite music groups/singers

What you like to eat and drink

Something you REALLY don’t like

A place you like to go and why

Chores you have to do around the house

Your favorite item(s) of clothing

Any abilities or talents you have, however unusual

Something you have that is unusual

Something you don’t have that you really want

Name of your best friend(s)

Your favorite store

Something you fear

Someone you admire

Your favorite movie(s)

Student Interview Questions (from www.brycehedstrom.com) Bryce divides his list into the “basic” questions and the “in-depth” questions. These are just samples. There is a much more extensive list on his website under the “Free Stuff” tab on the website given above.

Basic: Name/Name you prefer Age Do you have your license?

Do you like living in ___? How long have you lived here?

Do you have much family nearby?

What did you do last summer?

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Do you have a job?

What music do you like?

What video games or sports do you like?

What do you like to study? Dislike studying?

What is your favorite class? Least favorite class?

Deeper Questions (many more on brycehedstrom.com): What is there about your life now that would make your 8 year old self cry?

What dreams did you used to have?

If you had to leave your house every day, where would you go? What would you do?

Crashing on a friend’s couch, hanging out at a coffee shop, and playing video games do not count. You will have to do something all day, every day. What would you do?

If you knew you were going to die in one year, what would you do?

What are you missing in your life? How can we help you with that?

What do you really like, but hesitate to admit?

Has there ever been a time in your life that you have overcome racism?

If you were made the mayor of your city for one day, what would you do?

Is it possible to fall in love just by looking into someone’s eyes?

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Part Three: Appendices Welcome to Part Three of this book! This section is comprised of all the “extras.” In order to give you the absolute most up-to-date materials, you will find a QR code link to a folder holding all the goodies! You will find folders inside organized by the titles from the table of contents of this book. As folders are updated, the name of the folder will be changed to reflect when they were updated. For example, “Appendix A: Do-Nows and Bellringers,” would become “UPDATED 4/2021 Appendix A: Do-Nows and Bellringers.” We hope these materials will help support your Stepping Stones Journey! Happy Teaching!

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