I want to share with you part of a discussion I have been having with Ben Slavic about the use of embedded readings......
Ben, I keep thinking about what you said about reading vs. aural input. Which one is more valuable? I want to use my time in the best way possible!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know that sometimes I “avoid” storyasking because I am a) tired or b) afraid I will just “go all English” on my kids and ruin the whole thing. But they ABSOLUTELY need to hear the language.
I love to read. It’s tempting to do what I like to do. I like to write. I would rather do that than correct papers, make grade entries, write discipline reports, prepare department meeting agendas and answer emails. So I probably do it more often than I should. :o)
What I have been trying to do is to do reading AND asking together. I used to see the TPRS steps of Present Vocab., Tell a Story, and Literacy as not only the steps, but also as the order of operations.
I think that for novices, that is the way it should be. However, once students become literate in the TL, reading becomes the secret weapon. Embedded readings bring all of the best parts of storytelling/storyasking to reading.
I can:
use student ideas
include information about students
control the structures I want to emphasize
circle
park
create a parallel story..in the reading or as discussion
incorporate illustrations
use humor
add the element of surprise
differentiate
stay in the TL
be serious or silly
incorporate song lyrics
incorporate literature
connect with film
explore cultural/historical components
all while BUILDING FOR…AND ON….SUCCESS.
The hardest part of reading with my students?
No, not their reading skill level.
No, not their personal feelings/experiences about reading.
It is, gulp, letting the story and the students, rather than the storyteller, become the focus of the class.
Yup.
There is a bit of an actress in me…and director…and choreographer…and I enjoy those roles. I think, honestly, it is easy for me to ride that wave with my students.
But when I use the embedded readings, it is the students who get all the glory….for the writing and for the comprehension. I am more focused on the fun that they are having…rather than on the fun I am having (or not having if the story isn’t “going well” in my opinion)
It’s a more honest way to teach. It’s a little more humble. And I think that for many teachers, a little more achievable. One of the things that scares teachers about TPRS is the feeling that the teacher needs to be funny and dynamic. You and I know that that is not necessarily true….but all of the good TPRS presenters ARE funny and dynamic.
I’m not saying that embedded readings are for everyone. I’m not saying that I should (or anyone should) use them all of the time. But I am grateful for what they have done for my students…as language learners, as students, as readers, as people. I am also very grateful for they have done for me as a teacher….allowed me to focus on the language, the story and the student….and to hone the skills I need to do that.
with love,
Laurie
I think that several things combine to make embedded readings work:
1. The reps. It has LAYERS of reps built in.
2. The success. They know that there is completely comprehensible input there. It is a great way to build comprehension and confidence. It is also a fantastic way to create a bridge from the totally comprehensible input that we want to give them for acquisition to occasional opportunities to wrestle with less familiar pieces similar to those found on state/local exams.
3. The personalization. It is possible and practical to create our own embedded readings….but there is an entirely different POWER to the readings when they are based on the students’ writings or the students’ story ideas. It doesn’t matter if they wrote it, they came up with the entire outline or they added interesting details. They love looking for, and finding, their own contributions. Those contributions not only make the pieces more comprehensible…they make them IMPORTANT.
4. It is a great way to differentiate.
5. It incorporates a number of literacy skills that good readers use and that our districts are clamoring for. Makes a lot of people happy. But mostly my students, which means the most to me.
6. It works well with technology. Being able to copy and paste makes creating different versions a piece of cake. As Michele showed us above, it can be “written” by , and in the view of, the entire class. We can create stories where additional sentences or details “fly” in and out.
7. One set of structures or one story can be utilized in several levels at once. This is a lifesaver for many of us.
All seven of those topics could be a day-long workshop. :o) There is so much potential in this one process.
Not only can we create and share stories from our own students and our own classes…we could easily share stories between teachers…in different classrooms, in different schools, in different states, in different countries!!
with love,
Laurie
Here is a Friday embedding activity sold as a game!
Write a short script. Boring example here: I have a brother. He is tall. He likes to play tennis. He is in tenth grade.
Put it on LCD. Kids are in groups. Groups have three minutes to expand. Each group tells their version. Teacher types it as they tell it (or counts sentence or meaning chunks as they tell it and then types the longest one). The longest story wins. It goes up on the overhead for round two.
Repeat: groups have three minutes to expand that longest story. Type the longest one up and cheer. I only did this twice. It took us about twenty minutes and was very intense.
They really hunkered down the second time to be totally efficient. You have to insist on total TL use; that way it’s comprehensible to all.
I know it’s output. But it’s Friday–kindergarten day.
(after her next class she writes more!!! Laurie)
In my last class (a mixed level 1/2 group of 7th and 8th graders), we only got through round 1. The class figured out that they could embellish on the run, and there were some very middle-school embellishments. Here’s the first one from that group: I have a brother. His name is Howard. He has long hair. He’s blond. He has blue eyes. He’s tall. He loves to play tennis, football, and soccer. He’s in tenth grade in the state of Alaska in the town of Anchorage in West High. He has a dog. Her name is Penelope. Penelope is very bloodthirsty and small.
Here’s the longest–it got kind of unwieldy because three eighth grade boys have lately had a run on eating heads, arms, and small children, and they were interrupting each other to add more:
I have a green brother. He’s the very biggest brother in the world. He’s also the very tallest brother in the world. He has a father. His father works as an electrician. My brother eats my father. He also eats me. He likes to play tennis. He plays tennis badly. He is in the tenth grade. In a year, he will go into eleventh grade. He lives in the town of Jibuti in the state of Illinois. He has a parrot. His parrot likes to say, “Eat it up!” The parrot’s name is Bob. The parrot eats Bob’s head.
Given only three minutes of prep time, and because I had ask several questions because it’s easy to mix up “has a” and “eats a” (this was a great chance to set that straight in a truly natural way), I now have a new rule:
You get only X number of minutes to tell the story.
This class took half an hour to play, from setting up groups to reading every story. I was intending for them to do a fast write following, but we ran out of time. I might also change the prep time to two minutes for this group, and maybe a requirement for a symbol of some sort on a white board for every phrase so that they can’t free associate so easily.
In the other classes, the first round involved negotiation over what to say. In this group, the kids were focused right away on expanding, and they didn’t discuss names/description/age. In other classes, the second expansion included some negation of the longest story so that they could get their own information back in.
To decide the groups, we used a line-up of shoes from lightest to darkest. Then we counted off by threes. That took about a minute and a half. Then each person had to tell their group something unusual about a family member before sitting down together.
Michele
This turned out to be a very long answer. Hope it’s what you meant when you asked for an example!
I have been doing this with levels 1/2 up through the mixed 2-4/IB/AP groups. As Laurie says, it means that you can actually use the same story with every single class. Unfortunately, it also means that it’s even harder to remember who told what. It’s best to do the writing with the group watching and helping.
I started today with a story (that my more advanced kids wrote for my beginners when I was out sick last week–I e-mailed my sub a list of verbs that I wanted included). Here’s the story (watch how important the first line isn’t):
There was a dog. His name was Bob. Bob liked to talk, but his sister only liked to shout. Bob didn’t like to listen when his sister shouted. Bob’s mother gave him a pair of headphones so that he could listen to music. Then the sister cried, so the mother went to the store and bought a pair of headphones.
This got expanded with various extra pieces to:
Bob lived in (Anchorage, Alaska or other places) with his family: a mom, a dad, a sister, and a brother (and other family members). (and all their names) (and later, what kind of people they were, in some cases) Bob liked to talk, but his sister only liked to shout. Bob didn’t like to listen when his sister shouted. He always asked his sister why she shouted. She said she didn’t know. (One group explained that she needed drugs to calm her down.) He said that when she shouted, it didn’t help him do his homework. (got F’s on tests, broke projects part-way through) Bob’s mother gave him a pair of headphones so that he could listen to music instead of to his sister. Then the sister cried, and wanted a set of headphones. Why did Bob get the headphones? –To help him not have to listen to his sister. The mom explained that she’d only had one pair. (then there was some addition about who was spoiled and who got everything in the family, and who was the prince–different groups) She kept crying, so the mother went/drove/danced to the store and bought another pair of headphones, and brought them back to the sister. (Then one group had the girl continue to act out because once you start giving in to little sisters this way, it’s all over. Another group made everything end just fine now. One group had the other brother start shouting, for other reasons…one group lost the mom because when she went to the store she fell in love with the salesman…)
So really, this is just like the usual fill-in the blank story from Anne, except that it keeps expanding and expanding. And the different classes want to find out what the others wrote, so we’ll see what happens. There comes a point when I have to cut it off.
When I wrote before, I had three words for every class: sighed, broke, and swimming/traveling by boat. I gave those words to the kids, and each group wrote and gave me a different story in their minute of English (you can hand out mini pieces of paper for this writing activity). One group’s story was: “There was a whale swimming. It swam under a boat and broke the boat when it sighed.” We started with that exact story and ended up with a much longer one about how the whale wanted to get (forgot where) and needed money and there was a flamingo in the boat who had lots of money and was going the same place, but all the money weighed him down, so he couldn’t fly. As it turned out, he was part of the flamingo mafia, and was really a bad guy, so when the boat broke and he drowned, the nice whale had enough money to get wherever it was he was going. There was more about what the whale wanted when he got there, but I’ve forgotten. That story expanded over the course of three days.
Giving kids the three main words works really well. They love hearing their own stories come to life, and it’s a natural progression to expand on them.
On Friday, my last class of the day wanted to tell a tacky Valentine’s Day story in ten minutes. They created a muffin that fell in love with a rose, but his frosting girlfriend got mad.
Today, because some kids had missed Friday, the group wanted to repeat that story before we got to the dog story (and I guess we never really got to the dog story in that group), and it expanded to be that the muffin liked to dance and play basketball. He was at the gym one day and caught sight of a beautiful tall rose who was playing basketball so well that his heart nearly stopped. He immediately fell in love, but then his girlfriend saw him falling in love, so she ran across the room and slapped him, at which point he broke in half (complete with two different sets of actors falling down, a rose standing on the table to be really tall, stage slapping), and the cream went up to the rose and they ran off to the cafe together.
I got to add two reflexive verbs to the mix, and when a little first-year kid used a past-tense reflexive verb correctly (”broke itself”–which he had down because of the whale and boat story) to re-tell the story, his older sister (visiting the class to show off) had the classic dropped jaw. She couldn’t believe what she heard (she’s a fifth-year kid, and just learned that particular verb over the last two weeks, with all the second-year kids). Only lately have I realized that you really need reflexive verbs in Russian. I used to just avoid them all.
We told it with actors twice, embellishing as we went, and then turned to the drawing I’d left on the board last Friday so that we could re-tell it in a chorus. That was when my poor year 5 girl clearly wondered what juice these kids have been drinking. For her, what her brother said was grammar, because she had me for three years before TPRS. It’s a past tense, perfective aspect, reflexive, masculine ending verb. For him, it’s what happens when a “he” breaks. It’s just a vocabulary word. Even though she’s now had TPRS for two years, her brain still analyzes. My fault."
Michele
(I have seen this reaction too :o) Laurie)