When Things Go South!
OK, if you decide to put all the stories for all the year on YouTube, sometimes things might just not go as well as one might have hoped. In sixth period today, we had to stop the activity so I could make a new seating chart. I had let them choose their own seats for the month of November, with the understanding that they might need to get put on a seating chart of my devising, should their focus go downhill.
Well, go downhill they DID today. I thought, maybe naively, that because we were going to be looking at Bobrito (one of our One Word Images) who, thanks to the crocheted stuffed version of him that my friend Jillane made, was able to go to Disneyland with a student, they would be engaged.
They were engaged to a point but it all went downhill quickly. Watch and find out how!
My thoughts on why things went south: I did not reestablish good listening norms at the beginning of class. I need to go more slowly and be sure to point to the class rules EVERY TIME they break them. I was more interested in the activity than their behavior. I need to always remember that (as Susie Gross would say) discipline precedes instruction.
In the next period, we crested a story together with a character we created as a One Word Image, Dudelier.
Here it is
In French earlier in the day I told them a French version of the story I wrote for Spanish, on the science test.
Part One
Part Two.