Story-telling was one of the hardest things for me to start to get good at. I spent my first two years shoving twenty-four words into a story, saying them once, and then wondering why they weren't sticking and weren't helping. People kept telling me 'slow,' but it wasn't really processing, and it's only been over the last couple years that I've gotten anywhere even closer to being good at doing it. The guide I'm putting here is mostly a collection of lessons I've learned in the journey so far.
1. Come in with a plot. This week, the plot is 'someone has something they don't want and so tries to give it to people.' It doesn't have a lot of details in it. Maybe your story has a lot more details in it (at the beginning, mine always did, too. I knew where I wanted them to go, or what the object was going to be, or so forth. no shame in that), maybe it has even fewer, but either way, I always go into a story with an outline of a plot so I can drive the story in that direction. If it doesn't end up there, fine, but at least I wasn't flopping around helplessly.
2. Don't try to teach more than 6 vocab words in a single story. There will frequently end up being more than 6 new words in a story, but all these which are not on your List O' Words are icing on the cake. Things the kids can but don't have to acquire. More than this, and your kids are going to lose 'em.
3. Put your target words up on the board before you start. That way they know what their goal is.
4. Let the kids decide things. What the name of your character is, where s/he lives (if that's not hugely key), what color her hair is, whether he is tall or teeny, how many eyes he has. I was expecting one main character on Friday and got three - one small, one medium and one tall, and they have two eyes between them. This isn't going to wreck my story; it's just that three of them will now do what one of them does, and the kids have made this character theirs.
5. Go really, really slowly. In most of my classes on Friday, we determined who the character was and what it looked like and what the evil object was. In one of them, we got to the first location. We did this because I spent so much time circling the information in the story - was he a train? he was a train. was he a train or a screwdriver? he was a train. was he a screwdriver? he was not a screwdriver; he was a train. He was, if you're interested, a red train with blue stripes. I also try not to encourage more than two or three descriptive details about our character, because if you allow more than that, they're going to end up focusing a lot on that and not really at all on your target vocab/structures.
6. Also, remember to go slowly. Once the story really gets going and the train has an evil, people-eating screwdriver that it wants to give to Steven, it can be hard to remember to keep going slowly and asking a lot of questions. If you don't remember to do that, though, you'll end up with a fascinating story that none of your kids remember in the target language.
7. Tell them the rules of your story EVERY TIME you tell a story. My rules are: (a) everything I say is fascinating, so when I say fascinating things, you have to say 'oooh' or 'di immortales!' or 'eheu!' or 'babae!' (b) if I ask you a question, you have to answer, even if it's just to say that you don't know/don't understand, so I can help you. (c) if I say something you don't understand, you must ask. [to this end, every time i use a new word or phrase that i KNOW they won't understand, i stop and stare, fascinated, at the ceiling until one of them asks me what it means] (d) you must be sitting up, face forward, eyes open, looking cheerful. (e) if I ask you to contribute something to the story, like a name or place, it should be fascinating.
8. Have an end in mind. Your story won't always end up at the end you had in mind. Last year, Pancho (a character, not actually my student) ended up in the future and discovered that the meaning of life was McDonalds hamburgers. Not my plan, but where we ended up. That said, in the stories where I've not had a place I was headed, end-wise, the end has been very lackluster and not worth telling. Be prepared to make up an ending in case one does not present itself cleanly.
9. Use actors. Your kids are the best actors you have. Train them to do what you're saying as you're saying it so the kids can watch the story happen. Also, then your kids acquire a persona and contributes to the community. I have a kid who became Kenisha last year and was infamous for saying 'get this guy away from me.' Use them judiciously - if you're at a part in your story where there's no real action and it's just description, have your actors sit. When it's about to get awesome, ask them to stand (you can circle with your actors standing there. they'll deal with it) and act it out. Don't forget to circle just because you've got funny actors. If you have props, give 'em props!
10. Exaggerate. You, as the storyteller, are the Master Storyteller. If your tone is exaggerated and silly, it's awesome. It also keeps attention and is funny.
11. Give the kids jobs. It makes them feel important and definitely contributes to classroom management. This is Ben Slavic's list of jobs. In every class, I have a counter (who counts, on the board, the number of times we say each word), a timer (who times how long we stay in the target language), a buzzer (who makes a horrible noise when s/he hears English. my favorite is the kid in sixth period who looks horrifically offended, points and says AHH!), a painter (more on this in a different post), a lexicon (whose job it is to look up new words I don't necessarily know, like screwdriver), a Bad Magistra (who, every time I speak unauthorized English, bops my hand with a flyswatter), a No-Pressure Refresher (whose job it is to shout out NO PRESSURE REFRESHER and then a word or idea we've covered in class, and then we have to pause and go over that very quickly), a writer (who keeps track of the details of the story - this is usually a ridiculously on top of it kid who needs something else to do with him/herself), and a quiz (who writes 5-10 questions about the story that I can use as a quiz at the end of the period), among some others. When you start counting down to your story, it's really quite fun to see the seventeen kids with jobs drawing themselves up importantly because they know that what's next depends on them.
In some classes I have a Noise-Maker (I have a kid in one of my classes who cannot control himself. So in every story, there's something that makes a really annoying noise, and it's his job to make it every time it comes up).
12. Remember to establish meaning. When you have a new vocab word/phrase, if you can draw a picture of it, great. If you can act it out or offer a synonym, great. If you give the English, fine. Do what is necessary to make sure your students understand the new words.
13. Enjoy yourself. If you're not having fun, it'll show.
This is great even in advanced classes where what you're focusing on is literature. Use the structures and vocab in your text, and try to get the plot to mirror what they're about to read fairly closely (with, of course, some descriptions of their own and so forth), and it serves as a fantastic introduction to literature. Throw some history or culture into your story, and voila, you've taught both structures and culture/history. If you've a mixed class (say, an upper-level lit class mixed with a beginners-level class), then your upper level class can now read the original text, and you can have the beginners read the text of the story you told them (kindly recorded by your Writer and then typed-up (with, I'm sure, a little correction and flair) by you) or a simplified version of the text your upper-levels are reading.
My third period story looks like this:
Once upon a time in ______________ (kids offer suggestions), there lived a __________.
Circling: was there a? was it a ____ or a ____? did s/he live in ____ or ____. did she live in ___? where did she live?
What was its name? Was it tall or short? Did it have curly hair or straight hair? Did it live in house, a cottage or a hole in the ground?
Circle these things
Good. Once upon a time in _______, there lived a _______ who was called __________. She was very short and circular and had long curly hair.
She also had an evil thing. A bad thing. A very bad thing. A really horrible thing. What was the thing? Kids give suggestions. We circle it.
This is true. In ______, there was a __________ named. She had a ________. Above all things, it liked to ____________. (perhaps you have already determined the answer to that. in this story, it didn't matter to me what the thing liked to do, as long as it was evil and could be acted out. if it's important to your story, or your kids don't have the language to answer this question, or you simply don't want to leave it up to them, have a prepped answer for this and don't leave it up to the kids).
circle this. So-and-so didn't want the thing, because the thing was evil. circle this
So-and-so went to the ___________. In the bathroom, she saw ____________ (person). She showed the thing to the person. spend a lot of time circling this. ask questions like 'who showed the thing' or 'who did she show the thing to'?
and so forth.
Last thing: vocab words can be phrases, like 'likes aliens' or 'goes to the store.' It provides them with a chunk of language and not just a word, and this creates a thing in their memory which both you and they can work from.
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