In this episode. I'm going to talk about a very versatile strategy called a visual survey. It's basically like a picture talk combined with a survey and it's a way for you to present all kinds of different information from description to narration to information to opinion or argumentation. It's a great strategy that I hope that you will be able to use right away your classroom.The visual survey strategy is a super versatile strategy and I'm really happy to share it with you right now. So the ABC or D strategy or visual survey is also called the zoom tool or the Sheep game because it's really funny to get your classes to bleed out the answer like or or Mystic will named it that at the World Language were husband's you project summer institute's in Atlanta, Georgia in June of 2019. And it was so cute that theI'm just stuck. You can use the A B C or D strategy to review for images related to topics that you've already learned about or to teach new information that's contained in for images or to quickly cover information that students submitted via their card talk or in response to a student interest survey or through individually created characters. You can also add in an element of Mystery by asking students to send in pictures that represent something that they think would Stomp the class you can simply ask them to send in pictures of things. They like that no one knows they like simply to build community and describe general personal preferences and opinions to use this strategy to support content area studies. You can angle The Prompt and have them sent in pictures that relate to a topic for example, the bravest person, you know, or a picture of a fictional character whose appearance communicates something important about them or the contents of your backpack or the backpack of a friend or family member or your favorite place at school. You can use these strategies or this strategy to add whole batches of students en masse to the kid grit, either kids whom you haven't yet discussed or whose rows are looking kind of bare. All you need is a picture that represents something about for students that can be compared and contrasted perhaps information that they provided on their Car Talk cards or on student interest surveys or questionnaires. You can also use this strategy to project pictures of for students characters that they drew for individually created characters. And add information to the character kid grit, so that all students Creations get at least some AirPlay in class, even if they don't get selected to star in a story. You can easily talk about eight students per session for on one slide and for on another and then use the scaffolded oral review time to add the information to the kid Grid or the character K grid there by processing tons of student information in short order and making sure that more students get heard and known to their peers. You might want to make a special notation on the kid Grid or the character kid grid, perhaps writing in a special color or putting a border around the square to denote that the students information was added in the quick and Passed away so that you can prioritize making them the subject of some more in-depth discussion later in the year. So they don't feel like they got short shrift in your class discussions. The setup and execution of the strategy is quite simple. You simply paste for images into a slider document and I've linked a couple of examples in the show notes for this episode. You just paste for images into a slider document that you can project with each image labeled A B C or D you talk about each image as you would for a picture talk perhaps bouncing back and forth from one image to another comparing and contrasting and asking questions. Then you play a game in which you make a statement about one of the images and ask A B C or D and the class calls out the answer. Visual surveys are similar except that the information contained in the survey is designed to elicit students opinions on four options in a category. You can angle the category towards a topic. For example, you can project for images of various school supplies and ask which one is the number one can't live without school supply or which one will get you in the most trouble in math if you don't have it or which one your parents would be the most upset. If you lost or broke and had to ask to get it replaced, you can also simply ask students to vote for the image. They like the best and want to focus on for the upcoming shared writing. You can in order to elicit higher order thinking ask them to choose the two that go best together and lead them in a discussion of why they would or would not go together and perhaps select the appropriate organizational strategy for the shared writing if you've been working with various organizational schema during shared writing. Like compare contrast two examples part-to-whole Etc. Another option is to do a visual survey with picture voting you would replace the ABC and D with icons of culturally relevant items or other vocabulary that you need your kids to know like food or articles of clothing for example, and use the icons to ask the question. So instead of calling out a letter to indicate the photo that they want they would call out bread or cheese or socks. Or hat depending on the icons are pictures that you used to label the four images. Here's how to angle this strategy towards description which is the first cycle of instruction. So in description, there are four phases in that cycle just like there are with all the cycles and the first phase is describing setting. So in order to use this strategy to describe setting you would have four or eight pictures of various settings now some classes if they're the first year are generally Focusing on just describing the weather. So you might have four different pictures of just generic places or perhaps significant locations where your language is widely spoken and in each picture you would want to have different weather. So maybe one is raining one is sunny one looks hot one looks cold will look super windy. Maybe there's like a picture of a hurricane or something like that for upper level classes in description. Even if you still want to keep talking out the weather you could have like before during and after pictures for various natural disasters or environmental changes for instance, maybe pictures of the Amazon rainforest before the big forest fires and after and maybe also pictures of something that happened in the u.s. Maybe the California forest fires that happened a while ago before and after In order to use this in the Cycles on I'm sorry in the phases of cycle one on personal preferences. You can put four or eight depending on how many voting slides you want to have four or eight pictures of various things various examples of a topic or theme so you can have four pictures of different kinds of notebooks or four pictures of different school supplies. Or four pictures of various School subjects like classes of students doing things or let's say that you want to do clothing. You can have four different types of clothing and instead of just maybe asking them what they prefer you could ask them. What would be the best clothing to wear to a party? What would be the best clothing to wear if you go camping? In the phase of the cycle one where you're describing people's internal and external characteristics. You could have pictures of people doing things and ask them ask the class to vote on which one of these things would a brave person most likely do which one of these things would a studious person most likely do. In the Final Phase of the first cycle on description where you're comparing and contrasting descriptions of the present time with descriptions of the past. You could have two pictures one of the present and one of the past of a certain location either a location around the school location around town just generic locations or maybe locations in a place that speaks your language. So you might have a picture of Quebec a hundred years ago. And then a similar picture of Quebec now. you could have pictures of fashion or technology or art or movies or media from in the past and now and those could be popular culture that your students Listen to In Their Own Community or examples of culture cultural products from a community where your language is widely spoken or perhaps both You could also have pictures of people now and in the past or you could have pictures of one person's life that you have four pictures that represent various stages in their life. So when students are voting on the picture that they like the best sometimes they're voting on like their personal preferences, which one of these pictures that represents four different sports. Is your favorite sport to play which one of these pictures is your favorite sport to watch or do you not like sports at all, that would be the case for me. Sometimes they're voting simply on what they want to write about for the shared writing. So out of these four different pictures that show various locations, which Do you think is the most interesting for us to write about? In the case of if you want to set up a compare and contrast or part-to-whole type of shared writing. Then you might ask them to vote on two pictures, which one is the most important part of this picture that shows the whole so like here's a aerial view of Paris which one of these three other pictures that show different locations in Paris is the most important part of parros. people to know about Hey, it's Tina here. And I really want you to send me a message. So if you could just please hit the send message button or go to Anchor dot f m / curriculum Club / message. Then you can send me a voice recording who knows I might put you on a future episode. So if you could just let me know what you think or what you want to hear from me or how you think I'm doing or if you have a story to share or joke, or you want to see. Me a song. I Don't Really Care and here I'll even bribe you so by the end of the month whatever month it is that you're listening to this at the end of the month. I will go look through all the messages that I've gotten through the month pick one randomly, and I will give that person anything they want any one thing at all from our online school at CI - lift off dot teachable.com. So please hit me up. Send me a message by hitting that button or go into anchor dot f m so curriculum Club / message In the narration unit, you can also use the strategy. It's very flexible. In fact, I would say that you could probably use this strategy once every two weeks one of my goals in writing this book Stepping Stones your wannabe on and making the curriculum Club is to give you a tool bag full of very versatile. Very easy low prep strategies that you can use again and again so that you can get comfortable with of a repertoire of strategies from which you can draw a strategy and simply change the content and use it over and over throughout the year. So I've really prioritized easy low prep strategies that also engage students. So this particular strategy asks them to vote or to indicate their preferences. And so therefore it is easy for you to implement in the classroom because you already know what you're going to talk about. And it also is sort of known to you. Like you don't know which one of the pictures the students are going to vote on but you can prepare yourself, especially if you find like I do especially in Spanish that your language isn't quite up to like talking about whatever comes up in class. So to use this strategy in narration, you want to choose images that tell a story. So for instance, you might have a series of four pictures about somebody's childhood and then another series of four pictures about a significant event that happened in their lives and then perhaps another series of four pictures about their influence or you know, maybe monuments that are named after them or museums that are dedicated to their work or pictures that represent social change that they have affected in the world based on their life and their work and what they stood for. you could also ask students to sketch pictures that represent four episodes in their lives or four episodes in a book that they're reading or maybe even four episodes in a chapter of a book that you're reading and you could show one group of pictures another group of pictures and a third group of pictures and have the students vote on the series of pictures that they think would make the most interesting narrative when you sit down to your shared writing so this strategy which is kind of like a picture talk combined with a picture walk combined with a survey is easy low prep engaging to the students and truly can be used again. And again, you could use this once or twice every month once or twice in every single cycle of instruction. So that you have a strategy that's easy for you to deploy and not only that but you'll also be building up a bank of interesting and useful picture Banks or you know, PowerPoint presentations or Google slides that you can pull out again next year.
Learn more about using the low-prep, re-useable, and versatile Visual Surveys strategy...and leave me a voice message here. In this episode, I reference these documents. Visual Surveys Graphic Organizers that can be used with Visual Surveys Sample Visual Survey for Cycle One (Description) Phase One (Describing Setting) Sample Visual Survey for Cycle One (Description) Phase Four (Describing in the Past and Present) Sample Visual Survey for Cycle Three (Description within Narration) Phase Four (Biography — Selecting mini-stories to illustrate a significant person’s attributes) If you are not a Curriculum Club member, you can sign up for our waiting list. We will open registration around Thanksgiving for our Fall cohorts. The cost will be $34 a month -- about a dollar a day for daily lesson plans, weekly live coaching with recordings available for you to watch anytime. bonus live webinars (plus recordings available anytime) with Tina, our coaching staff, and special guests, and a private Facebook group where our goal is to answer your questions as we go through the curriculum. To learn more about the book Stepping Stones Year One and Beyond, visit our online school. And if you want to chip in to support my coffee habit, you can donate to the podcast here. 