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.

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 Reading 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. 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 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.

French Intermediate Reading

French Advanced Reading

English Beginner Italian Beginner German Beginner Reading Reading Reading

“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

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

No “Star Wars” Beginnings!

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

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.