Variation

A variation you can use to the dialogue journal is the story telling activity that most of us remember from childhood. One person begins telling a story. After a few sentences, the next person continues with the story and so on... You can end up with an extremely entertaining story. This activity can be modified for the SARAW program. Both you and the participant can write a story together. One of you starts by writing one or two sentences. The other person writes the next sentence and so on. This exercise can be fun for both instructor and participant because you can be as creative and goofy as you like. For a more challenging variation, you can write a story together where the person writing the sentence has to use the last word of the previous sentence as the first word in his/her sentence.

Scrambled Language Experience Stories (or Stories from READ)

A good way to learn how to sequence using context is to use scrambled stories. You can scramble language experience stories, short stories from the newspaper (that have been read before), or even the READ stories that you've used in previous lessons can be scrambled. Just remember to only scramble the word order, not the letter order.

See example below, taken from a story in the READ section:

holiday Jewish a Hanukkah is. called Hanukkah is Lights the of Festival. Each together families night, get. the menorah candle light They a on. They food exchange gifts and special eat.

Here is the original:

Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday. Hanukkah is called the Festival of Lights. Each night, families get together. They light a candle on the menorah. They exchange gifts and eat special food.

As you may notice, in the above example, we scrambled words within sentences. We kept the punctuation and capitalization true to the original passage.