Lessons!
So I just had a tremendously successful lesson that I thought would be a TOTAL FLOP. I can't take credit, it was all my teacher's idea.
She asked me to find two comics - Snoopy, maybe, or anything I liked - so that the kids could rewrite the dialogue and make their own skit out of the images. I figured this would go over like a lead balloon, sort of like the poetry lesson did for all but one class.
BUT NO. Apparently, the humor of Get Fuzzy (I was using comics I could find easily, and I happen to have a lot of Get Fuzzy easily available) transcends the boundaries of language. I think it helped that I picked ones that had a lot of physical action rather than dialogue - it meant that their skits were generally very similar but on the other hand, they could basically understand the comic without the original words available.
Whatever the cause, they actually seemed to have a good time - and for the first one they actually almost made the same comic as the original!
I had to explain it a little to the teacher though - not the meat of it, but at the end there's a "man behind the curtain" reference, which she totally didn't get.
She asked me to find two comics - Snoopy, maybe, or anything I liked - so that the kids could rewrite the dialogue and make their own skit out of the images. I figured this would go over like a lead balloon, sort of like the poetry lesson did for all but one class.
BUT NO. Apparently, the humor of Get Fuzzy (I was using comics I could find easily, and I happen to have a lot of Get Fuzzy easily available) transcends the boundaries of language. I think it helped that I picked ones that had a lot of physical action rather than dialogue - it meant that their skits were generally very similar but on the other hand, they could basically understand the comic without the original words available.
Whatever the cause, they actually seemed to have a good time - and for the first one they actually almost made the same comic as the original!
I had to explain it a little to the teacher though - not the meat of it, but at the end there's a "man behind the curtain" reference, which she totally didn't get.