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March 21, 2017

In today’s edition of thank goodness people are generous, I bring you the best new idea I didn’t think of, and basically didn’t understand until I saw it in action: Running Dictation.

To give credit where it is due, I have to thank Martina Bex, who got it from Michele Whaley, who got it from Jason Fritze.

What is running dictation? A great activity for my energetic and squirrely freshmen in Spanish 1, although clearly would be great at any level (I can’t wait to try this with my 4’s next week!).  As we are reading Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto, I took 8 of the “put these events in order” sentences from the Chapter 1 Teacher’s Guide and printed them out in a large font.  I cut them apart into 8 separate papers and had my student assistant tape them on the lockers outside my room.

To do the activity, students divide into groups of 4, and each person gets a job.  I used: Runner, Secretary, Illustrator, and Editor.  The first runner goes out into the hall and scopes out a sentence taped there.  The runner has to memorize the sentence and bring it back to the group.  The secretary then writes the sentence on the paper, with support from the editor and runner especially to spell things right.  Any question and the runner goes back to the source for clarification.  Then the paper is passed to the illustrator, who draws a quick sketch of the sentence.  The roles switch, and the process repeats.

My kids were crazy…but engaged!  One of my least engaged gals was an amazing runner, and didn’t seem all that frustrated when she had to make several trips to the hallway to check on one particularly tough sentence.

So, what can go wrong?  What “tips” to make it work?

1. Give everyone a job.  If kids are in groups of 5, make sure all 5 have jobs.
2. Call it a game.  Everything is more engaging if there is a game.  I’m not sure what my kids thought they were competing for, but they REALLY hustled to the hall.
3. Warn your neighbors.  If kids are going to be in the hall, you might want to warn the neighboring rooms that you might be louder than usual.  I’ve got one particularly picky science teacher across the hall.  He hates me, I’m sure.  Sorry, not sorry.  To mitigate the hatred, I stood in the hall when more than 1 or 2 kids were out there.  No major complaints!  Although, my room itself was really noisy.
4. Sentence choice–be sure to pick sentences that are very easy and also a little harder, but none too complex.  There needs to be something the slower processors can memorize and comprehend, as well as having a few that give a challenge to the top kids.  I mention that groups may want to have strategy in picking their sentences and you should pick the hardest sentence you can do, so you don’t stick someone else with one far beyond their level because all the easy ones were gone when they went out.
5. Number of sentences.  I did 8 (2/kid in each group) but it took a good 30+ minutes to do this.  In my block period, I didn’t worry too much about that, but if you’ve got shorter classes, consider how much time you want to do this.  It takes longer than you think.