Story Listening Experiment

In French Two, I decided to try out Dr. Beniko Mason’s Story Listening approach, in which she simply tells the story to the class, without their input into the ideas and plot.  She demonstrated this technique in my French Two class last week in Japanese.  I am using stories that the students wrote one day when I had a sub.  My sub plans that day (they were a little lame, I thought, but they were last minute) were to read for ten minutes and make a list of five new words they encountered in the book.  Then they worked with a partner to write their own story in French using the new words.

While casting about for a story to tell them, for them to listen to, my eyes fell on the stack of their stories from that day.  Since kids had been asking me, “When are we going to read those stories?” I thought well, why not use their stories for the Story Listening experiment?

In this video you will see a rather bizarre story of a bad kid who wants to eat a fish out of a bowl.

Conclusion?  It was fun telling them the story.  Having the script in my hand made it easy on me mentally and emotionally.  The fact that the story was written by a student in class mad me feel confident that the ideas would be more compelling to the kids in class.  They seemed to like the process and I was able to relax into it and have fun telling them the story.

We had the class artists illustrate the stories and we will use the art to write the stories up as a class later.  Verdict?  This could be a great new way to provide comprehensible input in a low-stress way for kids and me alike.

In this French One class we were reviewing the artists’ work when we launched into a long, unplanned discussion of m dog, Max.  I enjoy these little trips down Unplanned Lane so much.  We will take up the discussion of Boo… the ghost next time.  I just had such fun talking about my dog!
Part One
Part Two

In this Spanish One class, we are finishing the five level story of DeSwamperflosxs, a pumpkin spice latte with dating issues.  Kristen Wolfe started this story with the class last week when she was visiting.  Thanks to Ben Slavic for teaching me and Kristen this simple way of story creation.
Part One
Part Two

In this Spanish One class, we retold the story of the Machete and the Ewok for the benefit of the kids who had been absent during its creation.  This story is based on two characters we created using Ben Slavic’s One Word Image process.
Part One
Part Two

In this Spanish One class, we are creating a five level story about a pineapple named Gilligan.
Part One