Reusing Very Easy True Stories: Our Adventure with Mr. & Mrs. Zimmer
By: Aimee Kling
When I started my lessons with Valentyna 10 months ago, I immediately started using both Ventures Basic and Very Easy True Stories in the News for our lessons. However, it was clear that Valentyna was most interested in Ventures work at the time. Even still, she prefers the hard work and repetition of our grammar and vocabulary lessons to the story-based components of our lessons. She’s got an incredible work ethic and she wants to be fluent in English NOW!
Still, the stories are a great way to practice language in different ways, so I do still build them into our lessons. And when we got to one story in particular (Unit 10 - “Where Is Mrs. Zimmer?”), Valentyna connected to it in a completely different way. It made her laugh, she found it relatable (her son is a truck driver, and the story involves a road trip gone awry), and there was seemingly always something new to discover in the sentences and in the images that accompany the Very Easy versions of the True Stories. She even came back from a road trip vacation with her family and told me she described the story to them!
We spent a full 10 lessons on this story, repeatedly coming back to it because she wasn’t tired of it. I’ve spent multiple lessons on a story with students before, but never more than 2-3, so this required some continuous creative thinking on my part. How do I keep reusing the story in new and fresh ways, giving Valentyna the repetition she needs while still stretching her skills in interesting ways?
Here are 3 of the activities I tried:
Locate the Zimmers. Valentyna often confused “Mr.” and “Mrs.” in her read-throughs of the story to practice pronunciation. One way that I got her to say their names and distinguish them from each other repeatedly was to have her look at the thumbnail pictures of the story and identify which images include Mr. ZImmer, which include Mrs. Zimmer, and which include both. I would ask, “Who is in this picture?” and she would identify either “Mr.” or “Mrs.” Zimmer, or “Mr. and Mrs. Zimmer.” I would then sort the picture into a pile: Mr., Mrs., and both.
Chronological Order. I have a great set of dry-erase presentation sheets that cover different aspects of storytelling and language learning. Some are more appropriate for higher-level literacy learners, but many are useful in my lessons with Valentyna (who is a low beginner). One of the sheets helps us practice chronological order, which also introduced vocabulary such as “beginning,” “end,” “before,” “after,” “first,” “next,” “then,” and “last” or “finally.” (As a side note, after our first lesson with this activity style, I said “see you next week” to Valentyna and her face lit up as she recognized what next week meant, beyond simply understanding the gist of the phrase.) I would start small, taking a picture and asking “Did this happen at the beginning of the story?” She would say yes or no, and I would put the picture down, then draw another picture from a different part of the story and ask “Did this happen before the first picture?” From there, we might draw 3 or 4 pictures and have her order them chronologically, and once pictures became easier, we would cut out sentences from the story and work with the text.
Setting. Talking about where the story takes place allowed us to practice vocabulary and comprehension. For example, I would start by eliciting some of the vocabulary we’d practiced about locations in the story: I might ask “Where are they in this picture?”, looking for an answer like “restaurant” or “car.” I would write down the main locations (restaurant, car, Oregon, and California), and then have her identify which of the settings is pictured in a particular image. Once we’d practiced the vocabulary and pronunciation, we worked a bit on vocabulary like “to” and “from,” as part of the story involves Mr. Zimmer and his children driving to Oregon from California – without Mrs. Zimmer! This is also gave us a chance to use “where” and “who” repeatedly, and getting a strong foundation with those “W” words is a huge benefit in basic English proficiency.
Eventually, it felt like our time with the story had run its course, and it honestly felt like saying goodbye to a friend when we moved on to a new unit. Maybe I’ll keep thinking and come back to Mrs. Zimmer if I come up with new ideas for how to include her in Valentyna’s language growth.
I’d love to hear if you’ve had similar experiences with stories that students latched onto – especially if your students loved Mrs. Zimmer as much as Valentyna and I did!
Do you have other extension activities for lessons like these, beyond what’s included in the chapters?
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