If you could be something other than a teacher, what would it be?

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Purple guinea pig falls in love... The Story

The secondary students at Pukllasunchis have very good English speaking skills.  With one class of 12 students, I began the period by having them pair up, gather information about their partner, then in front of the class, introducing their partner to me as well as the whole class.

When I gave the class a few minutes to work together in pairs to gather information about their partner, these two boys were having a little trouble focusing ... perfering to chat with the girls directly behind them.  I kept going back to them and saying "Focus, focus, focus!"  Interestingly enough, they did the best job in the presentation giving the most information about their partner!


Next came story telling .... I began the story with "Once upon a time there was a guinea pig in Cuzco...." at which point I tossed a ball to a student who was to add to the story.  That student was then to add a line and toss the ball to yet another student.  Everyone of the students was totally focused on this story......What a colorful story developed .....
As the story expanded, I would stop the class every once in a while to either ask questions, or to do a quick recap of the part of the story which had just unfolded.
The final part of this guinea pig story was to have one of the students come to the front of the class and retell the whole story.... and believe you me, the class made sure she not only told the story in the right order, but all the details of how this purple guinea pig fell in love with a fat guinea pig..... but the fat guinea pig's father got upset when she came home late from the disco, upon which the fat guinea pig ran off to Mexico, met her cousin who proposed to her, they got married, had lots of little guinea pigs and lived happily ever after ....... what can I say..these were teenagers telling the story!

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