teeny tales make our teaching stick

 

you will hear us often refer to shana schwartz and her idea about how starting a lesson with a story can make the lesson and big idea "STICK". in this first teeny tale we will show you just how effective a story starter is for your little ones who just LOVE to hear about your life and to feel connected to their teacher.

in preparation to pilot the new kindergarten lucy calkins unit of study for reading many of us took advantage of going to workshops and other opportunities to learn about the units and some of the lessons. at more than one workshop the speaker used a particular lesson about a hat and my colleagues and i joked about how dramatic and silly this lesson seemed to be upon hearing it.

however, flash forward a few months as i sat there preparing to teach that very lesson. i ran around my school before the day laughing and saying... " i get to teach the crazy hat lesson." well this is actually a lesson about how just like people can be in disguise, words can be in disguise (they might have a prefix or a suffix or there may be a smaller word with a larger word). as i taught this lesson, i told the children the hat story. i told them how i noticed a lady in a really cute hat in the grocery story and how i just kept admiring the hat and noticing the lady. it wasn't until the checkout line, when the lady looked up that i realized i knew this hat lady.  then in an extremely excited voice i declared to the class, that "the lady in the hat was MY MOTHER! " "Can you believe it?  i asked the class.

 

 

this was the backstory... this year i had the wonderful opportunity to move along with some of my students to first grade I started to teach a lesson. I told the class that I had a really funny story to tell them, to which one little girl jumped out and said "please say it's the hat story?"
well i did not tell the hat story on that day but due to little monica's persistence and the way she asked me continuously to tell the whole class the hat story, i did end up having to reteach what my colleagues and I now refer to as "the hat lesson." not only did i reteach the lesson, but my new class kept asking about this "hat" and I had to bring in a favorite hat from home to be the prop.

as my blog counterparts and i chuckle over this teeny tale, what it does for us as teachers, is remind us how powerful our words are to our tiny readers. if you can hook them and gain their attention, with a story, a picture, an activity your lesson and the big idea will be one that these little learners will carry with them for many years. so as shana would say... tell those stories and "keep it sticky"!

jess & laura & melissa