Yesterday I decided to experiment with the Junior High class because they were not responding well to my stories.
So I created the following as a plotline.
Now keep in mind that when you're creating a story for a class, you start with three target structures and a problem.
The idea is to either solve the problem in the story or work on solving the problem even if you don't resolve it.
The reasoning behind this is that without a problem or some sort of conflict, you have no gas for your story. It's great to add details and funny little extra things to the story, but if the story does not have a plot, there will be no context for which the students to remember the terms.
My problem was that:
A boy wants a girlfriend but he has bad breath.
My target structures were:
Estaba triste (He/She was sad)
Quería tener (He/she wanted to have)
Le dijo (He/she said to him/to her)
I started off class with PQA asking the class how they were feeling. I thought that I could have my stories in the future highlight an emotional condition of some sort to tie them in together. It offers a good context for my brain at this juncture.
Then we went into comparing and contrasting how people were feeling in class. Until finally I asked for a volunteer. We established a new identity for the student because I didn't want to have any actual student to have 'bad breath' unless I clear it with the before class. So my actor wanted a girlfriend and he had bad breath. Throughout the story we added extra words. If the students wanted them written on the board, I wrote them, otherwise we moved on.
We had two different locations in the story due to time constraints. After class a student told me that it was a very interesting story. This helped. I also had one of my sillier boys in class act as a girl that had no nose who he ended up with at the end.
All in all a good story. Now today I would like to do a reading activity with similar but different details or a dictation as mentioned by Ben Slavic in his book TPRS in a Year!.
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