Let me tell you a story - in our digital classroom

One morning this week, after working late into the night without having made my plan for the following morning, I was giving up being the creative teacher.  But some caffeine, a hot shower, and a deadline worked wonders in getting me out of the rut.  As I showered, I remembered a workshop I attended on teaching language through stories.  Before I knew it, I was telling myself a story about my little dog who did not like to go for walks.  I was able to use all the vocabulary words, language structures from the current unit, and it's a very believable story (other than the fact that there's a dog in this world who does not like to go for walks).

Straight out of my shower, in 40 minutes, I wrote my story, revised it, and put it into a presentation on Google Slides.  That first effort was pretty crude, but it got the job done.  The story spanned about seven slides, I made sure there was some nice photo on each slide.  It helped that I had many cute pics of my dog.  Then, I made my lesson plan around it.

Basically, the lesson was in three chunks:  1) I did the storytelling with a lot of Q&As that demystified the new content, sort of like TPRS, 2) My students read my story to each other in breakout rooms to reinforce their reading fluency and character recognition, and 3) They rewrote their own stories keeping the same structures and keywords.  It's sort of like MadLib.  A student got pretty silly and wrote about his good friend the "giant bus," who wanted to sleep all day.  Some more straight-laced students wrote about some of their friends or family who only likes to watch TV above all else.  They went to town with gifs on their own slides.  I think the key to do this online is to assign this on Google Classroom where each student has a copy.

I was reasonably happy with the process as well as the product, because they heard the new content, interacted with it, read it, used it in their own writing, and eventually came up with their own stories.  (Gradual Release - I do, we do, you do)  Their next task was to practice telling their own versions of the story for a followup presentation.  As for me, I made my original story into a video (now with even nicer photos) using Screencast-o-Matic, and then made it into an Edpuzzle to assess my students' understanding.  Can I use it again when we eventually return to the classroom?  O yes, you bet!