Well... I finally got brave enough to try this today with my lower level E1s. We had a bit of a Valentine's Day chat... much shorter than with my higher levels and then did a live reading. They struggled quite a bit with this in comparison to the E3s but they did manage to produce a pretty impressive text for their level ( I may be biased!)
Anway I decided to take the plunge and have a go at the disappearing text described by Jason Renshaw in Going, going gone in so removed the prepositions and some of the adjectives, which they managed fine. Then I removed the verbs, they did struggle a bit but managed! Then I removed everything except the nouns. Then finally I removed the whole lot ( well actually I wish I'd been brave enough) ... I left them with the first word of the first and fourth sentence but they didn't need it. Between them they came up with the whole text.
Absolutely unbelievable... they didn't think they could do it... you should have heard them when I said I was removing it all ( I did leave them with the red underline marks). But they did it! To be honest I still can't quite believe it worked! But it was a lot of fun :-) I guess my only concern with this was the weaker students didn't get to contribute as much. Although one of my very weakest ( who really shouldn't be at that level bless her!) several times came up with the right preposition when the others were struggling.
Oh and whilst we're on the topic of live readings etc.. I did my follow up session with my E3 class and they told me that last week's class was their favourite lesson so far. That it was a great way of learning and that normally reading is boring but when it's a reading that's "ours" it's much better! They also loved the word swimming.
Well I can't get enough of this whole approach at the moment! I'm so grateful for how willing people are to share these ideas and thoughts it's really magical.
Here's the final fully remembered reading from today. But again please excuse the horrendous handwriting... it had been rewritten about four times by this point!
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