the explicit teaching of important Concepts
2. All have a short phrase or sentence following the interjection that quotes spoken words
The students are presented with the sentences, one by one, after Lori makes an orienting opener to them to help them focus: “All the items in our data set are sentences. The ones I will indicate as positive exemplars (yeses) have two common attributes or characteristics. One of the attributes you are looking for is something in the way the each statement is written; the other you will need to think about is the meaning of the statement (what it actually says). The negative exemplars do not have those attributes.”
Having given the opening orientation and asked for questions of clarification, Lori presents the data set in pairs. The first pair is:
Yippee! We won! (positive) We won the game. (negative)
The students ponder the differences and make notes.
The first six positive sentences are very clear examples of interjection.
They start with one colorful word followed by an exclamation mark and a short related phrase, also followed by an exclamation mark. These sentences clearly convey emotion.
ChaPter Six concept attainment 127
The next pair is:
Ouch! That hurt! (positive)
It hurt when the needle poked me. (negative)
Again, the students reflect and Lori asks them to compare the differences between the positive and negative exemplars. She mixes the order of positive and negative so that the students can’t use order without thinking about the nature of the attributes.
The next pairs are:
Whoa! Hold your horses!
Try to slow down and be patient.
Wow! That is a giant pumpkin!
That is a very big pumpkin.
Hey! Put that down!
You shouldn’t touch things that don’t belong to you.
Yikes! There’s a fire in the oven!
The grease is on fire!
Now Lori asks the students whether they have a hypothesis about the attributes that separate the positive and negative exemplars. They do not share their hypoth-eses orally; if a student states a conclusion, the other students tend to “shut down”
their investigation.
Now she presents another series of pairs where the differences are not as dra-matic as in the first pairs.
Hurry! The bus is about to leave.
The bus is leaving!
Phew! I’m not trying that again.
I’ll never do that again!
Oh! You’re here.
You’re finally here!
Now she asks the students whether they have new hypotheses. Next, she asks them to try to change some positives into negatives: “Please remove the part of the sentence that makes these positives.”
Ah, now I understand.
Gosh, I’m tired.
The first six negative examples state the same information as the positive examples without using an
interjection and with less emotion.
In the next three examples an exclamation mark follows the
interjection in the positive exemplars.
The sentence following the interjection does not have an exclamation mark and does not have the same level of surprise emotion or feeling as the first sentence.
The next three sentences end with an exclamation mark and convey emotion, but they do not start with an interjection.
Then she has students make some negatives into positives.
You mean the exam is today!
That was a real surprise!
If they can do these tasks, then they are probably beginning to attain the concept.
Finally, Lori gives them a short story whose prose contains a good many inter-jections and asks them to find them. The inquiry will continue. This kind of lesson frequently stretches over several days and, importantly, is part of a long unit where the students are studying reading and writing.
Lori also connects the class to Tumblebooks (www.tumblebooks.com) and they watch and listen as authors read their books. She has selected several books that include interjections and the students can listen to the authors as they inflect those words and phrases.
Several times when an author had read a sentence beginning with an interjec-tion, Lori interrupted the reading, moved the video back to the beginning of the sentence, and had the students read it without the interjection, discussing the effect that adding or removing the interjection had on the meaning and interest of the sentence. If you take a look at Tumblebooks, you will have no difficulty locating books where inflected interjections are employed.
S
c e n a r I o Lori’S SeCond LeSSonLori generated this unit after learning that a number of second- grade students were having problems with some structural analysis/ phonics concepts. For example, students had overgeneralized the “hard” sound of g. They would read or spell page as “paggey.” This was not their only structural/ phonics problem, so Lori wished to draw the students into an inquiry that would help them straighten out the concepts that govern sounds in the context of words.
Her notes indicate how she selected the items in the set. All positive exem-plars contain two attributes:
• Successive ge
• The ge must represent the / j/ sound
Her presentation begins with seven pairs where the differences are relatively unambiguous. She asks the students to compare the positive and negative exemplars and try to develop hypotheses about the attributes that the posi-tives have that are not shared by their partners. The pairs are presented one by one.
ChaPter Six concept attainment 129
Lori asks the students to reflect on any hypotheses they may have developed, but not to share them with the other students, because each student needs to develop their own— once someone else shares an idea, students tend to stop their inde-pendent thinking and try to test the hypothesis that was shared.
Now she presents another set of seven pairs.
Positive exemplars negative exemplars
In this set the placement of the letters is prominent. The negatives have both g and e but they are not together in sequence. The idea is for the students to refine their hypotheses as they see that the / j/ sound is generated when the g and e are together in sequence.
In the next set of positive exemplars placement is changed, showing that the ge combination is associated with the / j/ sound whether at the beginning or middle of the word and in multiple- syllable words.
15. germ
And, finally, Lori presents some negative exemplars where the ge combination is in sequence, but the “hard” g sound is produced. What is the difference?
The first seven words all end with ge.
These words using the same word family (and vowel) were selected to make it easier for the students to see the pattern. All have one syllable.
The next seven positive words continue to end in ge. They are still one syllable. They now have different vowels and mixed word families.
The ge combination is at the
beginning of the first three words. By the fourth word ge has moved to the middle of the word. The last four words have two syllables. My students were able to change agent to angry, urgent to rent, and digest to dig to make them into negatives.