Summer SAVY 2017, Session 4/Day 4- Telling Tales (Rising 2nd/3rd)

Posted by morganr1 on Thursday, July 13, 2017 in SAVY.

We spent our Thursday in Telling Tales talking about timelines while wrapping up our work on our pilgrims and tales for the pilgrimage tomorrow. At the beginning of class, students wrote a Two-Minute Tale in response to the “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. Students showed a lot of growth from Monday’s Two-Minute Tales in terms of developing coherent stories with clear beginning and endings, a central conflict, and some kind of antagonist (whether another character or just the traffic!). Some of our chickens made it across, some didn’t, and some decided they should listen to their mom and stay away from busy roads.
We talked briefly about timelines in literature. We learned why most stories (especially oral ones) follow chronological order but also talked about why storytellers sometimes use flashbacks, flash forwards, and foreshadowing. We also learned what in media res means (literally, “into the middle of the action” in Latin) and watched a famous movie that starts that way (Star Wars, Episode IV – although the students had a hard time imagining what it would be like to watch this movie without knowing all the others!).
After talking about timelines, we turned back to The Canterbury Tales to remember what information we got in the Prologue and worked on a prologue for our own tales tomorrow. Students also wrote 4-8 lines of verse to introduce their own pilgrims. The remainder of class was spent finalizing students’ tales, practicing them with classmates, and using a self-assessment tool to compare qualities of a strong tale with what they had written.
We look forward to see you parents and family tomorrow at the Open House where you will hear about what students learned about The Canterbury Tales, get a preview of their tales, and try to solve some of our word riddles from the week. I hope to meet you then (and if you can’t attend but want to hear your student’s tale, let me know and I will do an audio recording of it tomorrow and get it to you!)

Dr. Elizabeth Self

PS: Some of the students captured their chicken Two-Minute Tales on our audio recorder this morning. If you’d like to hear your student’s tale, email me, and I will email it to you through a secure link. Some students chose not to record theirs, so I do not have everyone’s!