At the top of my mind map I’ve listed, in very abbreviated form, my overarching goals (rooted in my beliefs) and the expected outcomes for the students I defined in my context statement.

Examining several simple folktales I identified a few key elements. Often (certainly not always) they unfold in a linear in somewhat predictable patterns. I represented these on a time line, which will be a central point of reference in my classes.

From this cluster of story elements I drew two lenses: universal and cultural. Every legend potentially has hearty doses of both. The stories have their own cultural and universal layers, and we hear (or read) stories through our own experiential and cultural filters. The class will explore both these concepts, which will serve as the foundation the expressed goal of creating a sense of community, trust and mutual understanding.

Boinging out from a balloon representing four skills — depicted as interwoven — are two content-related areas. The first refers to types of text we’ll use as source material for exploring the four skills; the second addresses specific language points that a) I’ve identified as regularly occurring in folktales and b) are geared to high intermediate to advanced students.

Dropping from the bottom of this balloon is “grammar,” which I see as the way we express the four skills. By understanding basic grammar, we can delve into the texts a layer deeper, exploring the stories from a creatively analytical perspective. I’ve represented unoriginally as a light bulb.

Finally, some of the exercises or tools we’ll use to accomplish these goals, from grammatical to analytical, are suggested at the bottom of the page.

A few other ideas I had along the way

• Start the class with oral stories, pointing out that that’s where stories began.
• Try an Aesop Fable as one of the first (I like the chameleon one from the Pro Lingua series, since it sets the tone of cultural and personal acceptance). Some prereading questions could be:
• Who was Aesop? What’s a fable? When was this one written? Why do we still tell it? Why do we tell fables to children?
• Along these lines, I think that it’s important to recycle the wh- questions (and “how”) for each exercise. They lend themselves well to this topic.
• Another potentially interesting exercise for an early story is for them to identify, say, five words they consider the most important in a given story, and we’ll talk about why.
• One book had the idea of drawing a map of the story: i.e. where did the person start, proceed, who did s/he encounter, etc. Complete with scenery. I like the idea.
• They could possibly make a poster to represent a legend from their own culture rather than have to tell it either without scaffolding OR directly from a boring script.
• It might be fun at the end for them to make up their own “folktale,” possibly with the story elements as outlined on the time line drawn from a hat (i.e. make up a handful of characters, settings, etc. and let them randomly pick and then compose a story following a defined format, with a moral.
• I could use La Llorona (my program) one day. That’s about it for now.