Hello my friends. It’s a long time since I have posted on here….but I am back. I’ve accepted a new position and you can read more about how that is going, I promise.
This post is to let you know that I have started to post materials for teachers on the Teachers Pay Teachers site. I’m trying to offer a balance of free materials and materials for purchase.
The first set of items is a series of Story Outlines. What is a Story Outline? Simply, it is a skeleton of a story!! One of the things that teachers often share is that they struggle to get started creating a story. I am hoping that these will be of help.
They are actually the format I have used to help students become better (or beginning) writers. It has been very successful and I hope that you may find it helpful for you as you plan for your students.
Here is an example of a Story Outline of a very familiar story!:
I have posted a free document that includes Ideas for Story Outlines on Teachers Pay Teachers, but I am going to upload it for you here as well. Feel free to look it over and ask me any questions that you might have!
Chabe wrote and asked how to find ideas to teach a particular structure and here is my response:
Here are some things that you might be able to try….
The first thing that came to mind when I read “se siente sola” (feels alone) was the English phrase…feels alone in a crowd. Because teaching a language is really teaching kids to put meaning to sound, we want them to be able to visualize or feel what the meaning is. So I Google-imaged (new verb! ) “alone in a crowd” and found these:
My guess is that you have several artistic kids who could, themselves, create incredible images for this.
Some questions that you could start with:
Where are people when they are not alone, but feel alone?
(a party, an airport, a train station, school, at home, the mall, the doctor’s office)
This is a good question to start with because they don’t have to talk about situations that they have been in personally…it is about places where, although there are lots of people, we might not know anyone, or we might not be understood. Which leads to the next question….
Do people feel alone in a ___________________ because they do not know anyone?
Next, offer them a series of reasons why people might feel alone…..
• They have a problem that no one knows about.
• They are missing someone special.
• They want to be somewhere else.
• They do not like what other people like.
• They do not usually go anywhere alone.
• No one is talking to them.
• They look different than other people.
• Everyone else has someone to talk to.
• They are treated badly.
• They learn something new and very surprising about themselves.
Next, give them a list of movies that they may have seen: (I Googled “movies in 2010”, thought about movies we have talked about, and used my own, very limited!!!!, knowledge to pick this list)
The Lovely Bones
Harry Potter
Dear John
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Twilight
Charlie St. Cloud
A great movie for this that many of them have seen (and if they haven’t it is easy to describe and imagine) is I Am Legend with Will Smith (2007) where he is the last human survivor in NYC.
I simply ask them to match the movie with the situation…or situations.
Take Harry Potter for example:
Harry has a problem that his human family doesn’t know about, he looks different because of his lightning-shaped scar, he is forced to live under a staircase at his uncle’s home, he is an orphan, he just found out that he is a wizard, he has to go to a new school…it goes on and on!
Another good connection would be books that students may be reading or may have read as part of the English curriculum….or historical figures This is a great way to connect curriculum.
Our students read Alas, Babylon, To Kill A Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men and several others that have characters that lend themselves to this discussion.
How about Rosa Parks? Martin Luther King? Abraham Lincoln? Anne Frank? Helen Keller? Albert Einstein? That list could go on and on…..
Even “famous” people who have “fallen”: Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, Ben Rothlisberger….folks who may have felt quite alone when they had moments in which the world no longer saw them as idols.
These activities or discussions do not have to take a long time. They could simply be the topic for a quick discussion….or a longer activity….whatever works best with your students and your program.
Once students are comfortable with the topic, it is easier to switch into a more personal mode with them. Brainstorm with the kids things that people do when they feel alone.
This is a list that they truly already have the vocabulary for:
Cry, sleep, read, listen to music, get on the computer, call someone, draw, write, run, make plans.
Some of them lead into good discussion:
Do you listen to sad music or happy music? Which singer/band is good when you feel alone? Why do some people read and other people run? Why do some people like to be alone? Who do some people hate it?
Create characters for students to identify with:
George would pay $200 to be alone for an entire day.
Let them create a life that would make George want to be alone. They will draw from their own experiences, I guarantee it!
Angus has to stay at his grandmother’s house and dog-sit on Halloween night. She lives in the woods, the weather is horrible, and the electricity often goes out. Who does he ask to hang out with him and how does he convince them to go?
Googling “se siente solo” and “me siento solo” I found these songs:
Me siento solo http://www.metrolyrics.com/me-siento-solo-lyrics-frankie-j.html
Hoy Me Siento Sola http://mis5sentidos.blogspot.com/2008/08/hoy-me-siento-sola-cancin-de-mariana-de.html
This one came with this: Una canción que describe como nos sentimos aveces cuando estamos tristes, realmente una linda canción que lo escuchabamos en la escena que Mariana se sentía trizte de la telenovela “Mariana”.
And a video…
And these comments as well:
me siento sola es verdad lo k aveces sucede en los adolecentes
ps la knción me identifik cuando sty deprimida..
esta muy linda…..
es lo sentimos muchos nos los adolescentes
esta canciòn esta super chida te puedes identificar con ella por que hay veces que nuestra vida se vuelve un tormento.
if you would like to mention how teens write on line in Spanish :o)
When I get into these conversations with kids I want them to understand the following:
• These feelings are universal. Every human, be they adult or child, male or female, rich or poor, from any kind of family will experience these emotions.
• There are positive outcomes from negative feelings. (learning to relate to others, having time to think/feel/process, trying new things, meeting new people, finding new strengths in ourselves..)
• We can take an active role in improving our situation.
I am so excited about the new students that I have!! This week they came up with a great idea…
I was just beginning to ask a story and we had a character, Mia, who was putting on makeup in the mirror in the bathroom on the second floor of her house. The class had decided that it was a full-length mirror. The actress was up in front putting on makeup and it was going fairly well.
In order to get to know the kids better, and for them to connect with me and each other, I have been trying to get as many students involved in as many ways as possible. So, I asked a girl who was similar in height, build and hair color to come up and be the reflection.
She was PHENOMENAL!! It was so funny to watch!! Then the class decided to name her Pia!!!! And now there were double reps! Mia puts on lipstick like Angelina Jolie and Pia puts on lipstick the same way. They put on lipstick like Angelina. (and with sing/plural!!) I thought it just couldn’t get any better than that! And then…..
At one point, Pia, the reflection, wasn’t paying close attention and missed doing something. I said to her in Spanish, “Pia, you are a reflection, when Mia does something you have to do it too.” I was just trying to get in a little more Spanish, but it backfired on me. I could see that she was embarrassed and felt that I had yelled at her. Suddenly one of her friends called out in Spanish, “She wants to be different!”
OH MY!!! A huge smile lit up her face and she said “Yes…I want to be different! I don’t want to be a reflection!” So it was decided, that when Mia was looking in the mirror, Pia did the exact same thing, but when Mia wasn’t looking at the mirror, Pia would do something different.
Oh the fun and the reps we got out of that one!!!! I am definitely bringing Pia back into stories again!!! (hint: at one point in the story, have the actor/actress get very close to the mirror…the actors/actresses end up nose to nose…hysterical!!!!)
One of the things that we try to do is to get to know our students. Ben Slavic has been posting some great pieces written by Bryce Hedstrom. Bryce writes about talking with kids in the TL in class.
Getting to know our students allows us to personalize stories and connect the language to our students. And vice versa!
Today we were working with a skeleton story written by students earlier in the day. The focus structures were: had the desire to, just about to start, and without rest ( the last two from songs we have been using this week….the first because it is a high, high, high frequency structure in Spanish). The skeleton story was this:
Two characters had the desire to win a race. They practiced for a long time without rest. Suddenly they realized that the race was just about to start. Oh no! Would they get there in time?
We had just finished an activity that had gone really well with the other two level one classes this morning…but not with this one. It went…..but not well. When we started with the skeleton story, I wasn’t really expecting bells and whistles. Oh my was I wrong!!
Our skeleton stories often use “characters” so that each class can choose their own. I took suggestions….Pee Wee Herman (how do freshmen even know who he is?!!), Barney, Terrell Owens (we aren’t far from Buffalo)…nothing seemed to click. Then someone suggested Obi Wan Kenobi.
BAM!!!!! The class popped out of their seats!! All of a sudden they were suggesting names for the second character….each one calling out their favorite Star Wars character and using Spanish to explain why that character was a better choice for the story. Three boys who rarely get fired up were falling all over themselves to get involved.
Then one girl raised her hand and said, “Nunca miro Star Wars”. A very quiet kid YELLED, “En serio?” (sorry…I’m on the laptop and cannot do the upside-down interrogative!) Now they wanted to start to tell the story of all seven (?) movies in Spanish lol.
I had absolutely no idea that so many of the kids in this group were Star Wars fans. Had we not started this story, I’m not sure if I would have ever found that out. Now I have a topic that has united about 10 students who have been stubbornly resisting any kind of unification.
Self-proclaimed geeks, jocks, troublemakers, and three Twilight groupies are now uniting to make sure that the rest of the class learns to appreciate the Star Wars saga in all its glory.
So far Obi Wan and Yoda are training without rest on Tatooine, so strong is their desire to participate in and win this race. When they realize that the race is just about to start, and that it is on Coruscant they must use the Death Star 2 to get there in time.
But look at what else we were able to do with those phrases via Star Wars…..
Has the desire to….be a Jedi, help Luke, find his father, join the dark side ( I knew we’d find a good use for “lo mas oscuro” this week!!!!), kiss Leia, etc., etc,
without rest….train to be a Jedi, fight the dark side, protect Leia, etc. etc.
was just about to start…..the war, the search, the battle,
And that was just in the last 10 minutes of class!!!!
I started the activity thinking that they would want to talk about themselves as runners, or their favorite athletes….hoping to use personalization to “hook’ them into the story. Well…it did…just not in the way I anticipated. Personalization leads to great stories….and vice versa!!