Classroom Chronicles
The Power of Storytelling
My students and I have been working with a new curriculum. There’s a Focus unit and a Flow unit. We are halfway through the Focus unit. At first, the students were reluctant to tackle the challenges of the unit. Each lesson builds on the previous one. There’s a lot of vocabulary and reading involved. However, the main purpose of the curriculum is to get students to write more and use more details in their writing.
The new curriculum, like its predecessors, has promise. There are things I like about the lesson slides that are easy to read and understand. There are also lots of images and suggestions about how to implement specific activities in the lessons. What I don’t like is that the slides will often be 3 or 4 slides deep for one activity. If we followed every single aspect of each activity, our progress would be tremendously slow.
I like to keep things moving. And just like it states in the Focus unit, keep my students focused on the key aspects of the lesson. I adjust the lesson slides as I see fit. I know my students and many would not do well with a bunch of slides full of words and not enough activity. In the process of doing the lessons, I discovered that many of my students are good storytellers.
There’s one young man in my first group that definitely has a career as a writer. When he shares his stories, they’re full of imagery and metaphors. His words draw the entire class into the story. As I listen to him, I can see the emotion on a character’s face or understand the reason a mother and daughter had an argument. I enjoy listening to his stories. In my second group, I have quite a few storytellers. Many in my second group are eager to share. The class flies by and the bell rings signaling its time for the next class.
My students enjoy the opportunity to share their creativity. Their stories touch on real-life issues. They want to show what they know. I love it! I told them on the first day of school that I wanted to cultivate their genius. Each student brings something to class and I want them to use that something to help them with the assignments. I really want them to believe in themselves as I believe in them.
