Quick and Dirty Oral Language Strategies

How about something I can use tomorrow in my class, Greg?

Deb Vanderwood asked me to submit some oral language strategies for a literacy newsletter she was doing for the district. I'll post them here in case you, dear reader, need a break from my recent self-indulgent thread of woodworking articles.

Here are snapshots of low-prep, high-yield speaking, listening, and thinking strategies and activities:

• The News 
• Two-Headed Story Machine 
• Picture Detectives 
• Three Pictures 
• Mini-Debates  
• One-Minute Speeches 

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The News 

I adapted this idea from Brenda Miyanaga.  At the beginning of every day, every child can come up and say one sentence about what is going on in their lives.  It is kind of like oral Twitter. I have a mic set up in my class (so *I* can be heard without yelling), but you do not have to have one.  Guests to my class remark how comfortable students are with speaking in front of others.  It could be due to this non-threatening routine.   

 

Two-Headed Story Machine 

I lifted this one from Theatre Sports.  If you can, demonstrate this to your class with another adult or a quick-thinking student.  With a partner, tell a story together, but each partner/head only gets to say ONE WORD at a time, going back and forth.  This is a fun way to generate random story ideas.  Partners have to listen carefully to each other, and teachers can work in a lot of grammar into this strategy. 

 

Picture Detectives 

Show an illustration from a picture book, a screenshot from a movie, a photo from a Social Studies or Science book, a news photo, etc.  Students use the 5Ws to figure out who, where, when, what, and why from the picture plus explain HOW they know based on the evidence from the picture.   This strategy uses inference and evidence.  Teachers can use this as a pre-reading strategy or a story generating method.  My class used this strategy to write news stories. 

 

3 Pictures 

(Joni Tsui told me about this one which originally came from Faye Brownlie).  When introducing a new topic, show students 3 pictures, but do not tell them what the new topic is.  Instead of trying to generate statements about each picture, students generate questions orally about each picture (to expand their thinking), one at a time.  Without answering the questions, students try to figure out what connects the three pictures.  For example, to introduce the water cycle, the teacher could show a lake on a sunny day, a hurricane, and a hydroelectric dam. 

 

Mini-Debates 

(Kevin Akins used the Academic Controversy strategy that I morphed into Mini-Debates for my primary class).  Introduce this strategy with an accessible “issue” (Skittles are better than Smarties, beach vs mountains, etc.).  If you can, demo this with an adult.  Part 1: Person A (the teacher) talks for 30 seconds explaining the Pro side of the issue while Person B listens.  Then Person B has up to 30 seconds to speak about the Con side while Person A listens.  They have another 30 seconds to have a chat freely about their ideas.  Part 2: They switch sides!  Now Person B is the Pro person and speaks for 30 seconds, and so on.  This strategy exercises thinking on your feet, listening to your partner (so you can refute or use their ideas), and looking at an issue from both sides.  

 

 

One-Minute Speeches 

Students write, practice, and perform speeches one-minute long. For my 2/3 class, I get them to do a speech about a non-fiction topic.  (We do so much story writing so doing factual writing is a nice change).  We use Bev Kelly’s paragraph map (on 11x17), and adapt it into a “speech sandwich” with the box at the top for the intro, the box in the middle for the closing, and the boxes in the middle for the categorized body of the speech.  Once crafted, students cut these boxes out and they become ordered cue cards.  Students practice and perform their speeches.  The best part is when the class listens and gives the speaker feedback: “I noticed you stayed on topic.  I could hear every word.  I learned new things.  I thought you were brave.”  

 

 

99% Invisible - My favourite (design) podcast

 As you know, I love listening to audiobooks.  I "read" non-fiction during the day to stimulate my brain as I do the dishes, and I like a good story to help me unclench my brain so I can go to sleep.  Since COVID though, I find myself listening to podcasts more and more.  My favourite right now is Roman Mars' 99% Invisible.

99% Invisible talks about the untold design stories about everyday things including household items, flags, architecture, and even some big ideas such as social design.  This is right up my alley!  I am always thinking about how design works in my classroom and society as a whole.  There are so many other things to like about this podcast: the way they create an interesting audio narrative; Mars' voice which is warm and whimsical; the sheer amount of content (close to 400 40ish minute episodes), etc.

The way I got into 99% Invisible is kind of meta meta.  I found out about it by listening to the audiobook The 99% Invisible City (A field guide to the hidden world of everyday design) which was a reading of a text-based book of the same name whose material came out of the podcast.  So I was listening to a spoken version of a text based on audio, (for those of you playing at home, that was audio-text-audio), reporting on something primarily visual: design.  

I have learned so much by listening to this podcast.  It is kind of like a master class in design.  Most of my favourite episodes are mostly about architecture (such as the ones about Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonia, airport design, bubble houses, and structural integrity), and there are others that will not let you look at ______________ in the same way again (e.g., rock paper scissors, NYC sculptures, bad smells, sound effects, etc.).    There are even a few school/education/child related design episodes (Froebel's Gifts, Noguchi's Play Mountain).  

My hope is the 99PI does an episode or two on classroom or school design.  Maybe they have and I haven't heard it yet.  

Now, like the unofficial motto of 99% Invisible, I always read the plaque.  (Unless, of course, I can find a podcast or an audiobook of someone who will read the plaque to me.)

Curves! The Rocker Stool

 So much of the architecture in my classroom (and every class I've had) is the domination of boxes, rectangles, and straight lines.  In our math class, we don't just learn the names of shapes, but we also talk about the impact of shapes.  Though rectangles give order and alignment, they also promote uniformity and a feeling of being boxed in.  The desks and tables are rectangles, the windows are rectangles, the books and storage boxes are rectangles, and the floor and ceiling tiles are all rectangles!  If you squint really hard, it looks like a Minecraft world.

I try to soften up the room by adding lots of non-linear elements.  I hung flowing draperies all over the place, some even on the windows.  I put up spherical lamp shades all over the place, some even used for lighting.  I have clocks all over the place, and some even tell the right time.  But with my limited woodworking skills, a lot of what I built and brought in (the risers, lap desks, storage bins and shelves, etc.) were, sigh, rectangular-shaped.  

Now, maybe I am turning a corner by using my new jigsaw!  One of the big benefits of finally getting a decent jigsaw is being able to cut curves.  Apart from my laptop stand, my first real curvy design is the rocker stool.  I used some leftover plywood when I took apart a space-usurping TV armoire (remember those?) from our living room.  

I brought the rocker stool to my class and saw how students used it.  Some sat so they could rock sideways like in a canoe.

Other students straddled the stool and rocked back and forth like a rocking horse.  It was interesting how they decided to use them to go in two different axes: side to side or forward and back.  In both cases, they kept both feet on the ground.  

Hmmm.  I can see this rocking motion allowing movement, balance, and core development in the same way exercise balls and wobble stools do.  But the advantages of the rocker stools over inflatable exercise balls are: the rocker stools are more stable and take up much less room.  The advantages of the rocker stools over the wobble chairs: the rocker stools are more stable (I've had wobble stools dismantle themselves while kids are on them, or slip out from under students while they put their feet on the base or spun around on them), and I think the natural wood fits in with our classroom's more organic palette than the blue or black plastic wobble stools.  

This original prototype was meant for me, so I could rock and watch TV (yeah, we bought a more up to date TV after deconstructing the TV armoire).  Because of my sciatica problems, the idea was to rock back and forth instead of lying prone on the couch, and I was going to add some padding to cushion my bony derriere.  When my students tested the prototype in class, their feedback was great: this rocker was too high and the edges were too sharp.  The next rocker was much lower and I smoothed all of the edges with a sander.   They really like Rocker 2.  I just finished Rocker 3 today (based on more student feedback, it is in between in size of Rocker 1 and Rocker 2).  I'll let you know what they think.  

I probably won't get to bring the original rocker stool back home again, but that is okay.  I wonder what else I can do to add some curves to my classroom.  Curves, literally, add another dimension to the design capacity of my classroom (and my woodworking).