My upper levels have been learning about magic recently. I love teaching with video clips, since (I'm referencing the delightful and amazing Evan Smith here) visual vocabularies are indispensable. The more we can provide kids with a visual representation of information, the better a handle on it they'll have. So I've shown them three video clips:
-Mickey Mouse from Fantasia, stealing the magician's hat and making the broom do all the work
-David Blaine doing card tricks for Harrison Ford and getting summarily ejected from his house (I highly recommend you google Real or Magic Harrison Ford David Blaine, and then, if you're going to show it to your students, stop it before Indy drops the F bomb)
-The great scene from Hocus Pocus when the witches turn Thackeray Binks into a cat so he can live forever with his guilt (wonderful opportunity to teach the kids pedicis aeternis - in eternal chains - if you've been looking for one of those :D)
After several days circling vocabulary, telling stories and going back through these, today I wrote up three summaries, one of each clip, using vocab and structures we've been practicing. I also included some things that were patently false. Some stuff was little, some much bigger. Some sentences had no lies; others three or four (generally the ones with the information I wanted repeated several times had more lies). I gave them the following instructions:
Primum, sellae in paribus ordinandae sunt. (first, set up the chairs in pairs.)
Secundum, prima sella coram altera sit. (second, the first chair should face the other.)
Ultimum, una sella coram tabula sit, sed altera ad contrarium. (last, one chair should face the board, and the other the opposite direction.)
I gave them three minutes to do this, assuming it MIGHT take a minute. Then I did something else with the other two minutes I'll explain in the next post. (spoiler: i donated it to their PAT fund, since I got to keep teaching sooner.)
I told them (in English) that the student facing the board would read, slowly, the summary. Every time the one NOT facing the board heard a lie, they should point rudely (we practiced doing this) and shouting, "MENTIRIS!" (you're lying) They then had to provide what the correct information was. The reader now had to say the sentence over with the correct information in it. When I dinged the bell, they were done whether they'd finished or not. Now they switched roles, switched seats, and read/listened to the paragraph again.
At the end, we read it together. I read it, and they caught me out on my lies, and I asked them for the correct information, until I finally made it all the way through. Then we chose our favorite voice (valley girl, Yoda, whatever) and read it together, out loud, making all the necessary corrections. I got HUGELY positive feedback from the kids, including:
-it's good to hear other people reading to us
-we heard it a lot of times but didn't get bored
-we had to be really on because we were listening for the lies
-we like to point rudely at people and shout, YOU'RE LYING
-it's fun to make people repeat themselves
We'll read the other two paragraphs tomorrow, and then we'll create our own definitions of a wizard.
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