Blind Retell

This activity is based loosely on Betsy Paskvan's awesome Blind Retell. I like to do this after a Movie Talk because it provides an image with a distinct story attached with which all the students are already familiar. The ones have been watching, for example, Monsterbox (which is adorable, and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it). I showed them them this screen shot:

I asked them to find partners and to spend two minutes writing as many descriptive sentences as they possibly could about this picture. Then I went around the room and asked each pair to give me one sentence, which I typed (correctly) on the projector screen. I asked the pairs to then imagine we were going to narrate that scene using only those sentences, and to write the sentences on their white boards in the order in which they thought best, in- or excluding whatever they thought necessary. One of the students volunteered his, and then I took modification suggestions from the rest of the class, voting on each modification. At the end, we had a student-created narration of the scene.

We read through it together, circling and questioning about the information until I was certain they understood what was going on. Then we went through each word and assigned it a hand motion, practicing each one. After every few hand motions, I either showed them the hands and asked them to define them, or I said the word and asked them to show me the hands.

Then, I started signing silly sentences at them, which they'd say out loud and then realize what the sentence was, which was excellently funny and also a really good, contextual representation of the words. I also signed case endings at them (if you are unfamiliar with this, visit magistrula.com, or you can see Anna Andresian explain/demonstrate that here. My students have created their own hand gestures for this, but the concept remains the same.

Then, I signed each of the sentences at them, and they read me the sentences. Then I signed the sentences, and they read them.

Thereafter, I had them get into pairs, in which one student could see the board and the other one could not. The student who could see the board signed the story at the student who couldn't, and the student who couldn't told them the story. I periodically rang a small bell. The first time, the students switch seats. The second time, students find new partners. After about twenty minutes of this, I took volunteers to do this in front of the class. They could choose whether to have the class sign to them or not. They got a yummy as a reward for doing this. It worked brilliantly, and even the next day, when we played a different game, and I asked them questions based on this, they had it pat.

UPDATE

I did this teaching new vocab as well. We simply assigned hand signs to each of the words, and then as we progressed, I signed silly stories at them - gesturing cases (for all you Latinists), gender (three fingers up - feminine; three fingers down - masculine; three fingers sideways - neuter), tense, and person - and they recited them at me.

Then I gave pairs five minutes to write a two to three sentence story out of mostly the words we'd used. We constituted signs for and, but, because, and is, and then each pair stood up and gestured their story. After each story (that we told while the pairs gestured them), we circled and asked questions about the story that was told.