Tell To Teach

How to Select and Adapt a Story

1. Choose the “target” story. It can be a fairy tale, a legend, a story related to their class curriculum, or just a simple story of your own (see my sample story, El osito). With beginners, it is best to stick to simple stories.
2. Re-write the story. Adapt it by using simple, high frequency language and short, repetitive phrases, adapting it to your students’ proficiency level.
3. Extract the main vocabulary needed to understand and divide it in two sections: Vocabulary they know and New Vocabulary. There will also be another section of the words we don’t need to teach, like certain conjunctions, etc., which they will get from context.
4. Divide the New Vocabulary in sets of three (look for ways to make up good combinations of words, instead of teaching isolated words).
5. Prepare lessons for each set of three structures as follows:

Day 1 - 2

1. Establish meaning: use gestures, Total Physical Response (TPR), illustrations, props, etc.
2. Do PQA, (Personalized Questions and Answers) and circling
3. Proceed to build a story; circle the structures, recycle vocabulary, do pop up grammar, retell the story
4. End with either you or one or more students retelling the whole story in the target language.

It might seem simple, but you will find that you will be actually using more than those three structures. Along the way, in the same story, we will find it very useful to weave in adjectives to describe the main characters and include facts like colors, days of the week, numbers, cognates, etc. With more advanced students it is also advisable to include some sort of dialogue to start making use of the first and second person singular.

In my sample story, I have included the list of words that appear in each mini story, as well as some suggestions for gestures in the first section (Establishing Meaning), and in some cases, some lead questions to develop a PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers) section.

It is also good to include at some point a comment or expression such as: What good luck! or That’s too bad! or I cannot believe it!

Day 2 – 3 - 4

1. Reading
2. Comprehension assessment
3. Free writing

Once the story has been told, repeated, acted out, retold, etc., it is time to bring the written version. This might be either on Day 2 or 3, depending on the time we need to do the oral work. There is no set rule to time this. You can move on to the next step whenever you feel that the PQA or the mini-story has lost momentum.

You can write the story on the blackboard as the whole class contributes to remember it and they can copy it on their books. You can also bring a printed copy of the story for each student or write it on a large poster. I prefer to do individual copies, and my students glue them to their book. Older classes get a binder to collect their class stories. Discuss the reading as you go, compare it to their own lives, ask more questions, circle, compare and contrast, do grammar pop-ups whenever possible. Again, this is part of the art of teaching.

The written story can be read by you, the teacher, especially in the beginning, so that the students can understand it better by focusing on the sound, and also so that they actually learn how to read in Spanish, since they have had no previous experience. As you read, you can translate or else ask for the general gist of the story at the very end. It is always useful to translate slowly because it is also a way to assess their comprehension. Sometimes there are things that look obvious to us but are not to the students.

Another good idea is to have some volunteers act out the story as you read it. You can also have the whole class do the TPR gestures of the main structures as you speak.

There are several different activities you can do after the reading. Students can draw the story in four to six frames and retell it. Or, if you bring the illustrations, you can read random sentences and they have to identify to which frame they belong. Or you can write several sentences in the wrong order and they put them in the correct order, etc. You can also have them illustrate the story, or you can bring the illustration and ask questions from it, etc. See the samples.

At the end of the story, it is good to recycle all the structures, make a list of them to review, and include any new vocabulary that showed up in the final version. The sample mini-stories below will take us to our final goal, the reading of the original target story, El osito.

This is a good point to have some or all of them practice speaking. Once they illustrate the story, they can use their illustrations to guide them into retelling the whole story.

They will be ready then to do a “Free Write”, which means writing the story on their own. This is a great way for them to sit quietly and practice fluency in writing. In this exercise we don’t try to correct their accuracy, it is merely an exercise in fluency. We usually have them count how many words they can write in any given time, say, ten minutes.

Next Day

Start all over with a new set of three structures with Step 1.

As you work through all the structures in this way, in the end the students will be able to read, understand, retell, and enjoy your original target story.

In the following section we will explore the path from designing your target story to creating your curriculum and working through it with your students. At the end you will find the final rendering of the reader, beautifully illustrated by Maia Kobabe, professional free-lance illustrator and Waldorf alumna from Summerfield Waldorf School.