Whoosh
11/23/2019
In Spanish classes, Lower School students are occasionally heard saying “Whoosh,” while they run a hand over their heads. This is helpful behavior, because what they mean is, “You lost me somewhere.”
If students are listening, watching, or reading something they understand, they are building an implicit understanding of the language, whether or not they can identify individual words, and certainly without necessarily being able to translate into English. Translating is a completely different skill area, but even so, we often ask “¿Qué significa …?” or, “What does ... mean?” Asking the question slows the teacher down, and an observer might notice that the teacher asks not a student with a confused look, but rather another one who is sitting nearby. A student may not always be willing to admit that she doesn’t understand, or that he is lost in the flow. When the teacher stops to check comprehension, there is a chance for extra processing time, as well as the opportunity for students to get verification that what they think they understand is correct. Another way to make sure that students are understanding is to ask them to draw pictures of what we are reading or of the story that we are telling. Last week, the fifth graders drew pictures of the calacas (skeletons) in a story about Day of the Dead as they progressed down a street. Today’s pictures are supporting a story about a bad baby with grades three and four, and of the adventure when our heroes inadvertently joined the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, with our fifth-graders. Maybe we should all be checking for comprehension in daily life, because most of the problems in our world come from times that we are sure we’re being clear, but others understand something completely differently, and we end up talking past one another. Comments are closed.
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