One of the great joys of teaching CI in the springtime is using OWATPS (One Word At A Time Picture Stories), a more beginner-friendly version of OWATS. I always use Google Drive to make this happen in my classroom and have recently been using Team Drives with great success. I am fortunate that my students bring their own laptops to school each day. Using these in the spring is great for many reasons:
1. It capitalizes on the classroom culture and groupwork skills that you have built throughout the year - all that work pays off!
2. It gives you a chance to be facilitator instead of performer - low energy teachers can do OWATPS!
3. It gives students a substantial amount of voice, especially because the picture component supports a greater sharing of workload within the group.
4. It covers a large swath of planning if needed. My students almost always need two days of writing to create something worth reading, and it almost always works out that two days are needed to read most (but probably not all) OWATPS.
5. It can introduce or review vocabulary or serve as a break in the middle of a unit when they crave novelty but haven't had enough repetitions to move on yet. So it fits anywhere in a unit!
6. It works great for shortened class periods, standardized testing days, etc.
7. Students use the word wall and their memories to recycle numerous old vocabulary items!
8. It provides some nice evidence of their growth through the year, especially in areas like circumlocution and complexity of sentence structure.
However, OWATPS is not all sunshine & adorable puppies. Sometimes groups have difficulty working together respectfully. Sometimes students need a lot of guidance on how to work with their peers instead of just the computer. Some of the stories aren't going to be great. But no activity is perfect.
To wrap it up, if you are unfamiliar with OWATPS and teach beginners, it would be a great time to try it out. You may want to do the tech thing if your students are familiar with that, or you may want to do it more traditionally. Only you know what's best for your classroom.
And to finish it off, here are two fun example pictures from my students' recent creations:
Until next week!!
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