A New Kind of DOL

Many of you probably do Daily Oral Language (DOL) or something similar. When I first started teaching, my school gave me a big DOL book with sentences for me to put up on the board every day that my students then corrected. (The book wasn't big because it was thick; rather, it was big, as in, long and next to impossible to find a convenient place to store, because it didn't fit on any of my bookshelves—what were the publishers thinking?!) There are a couple of problems with traditional DOL, in my opinion. First, there's usually no real and meaningful connection to what the students are learning and, second...it's boring. Not that everything we do as teachers needs to be exciting and fun, but it certainly helps! :)

Enter: The Class Letter. The first change I made to DOL was to turn it into a letter to my students. I write it every morning before the kids come in, and we begin our morning meeting with it. Each letter has a variety of mistakes in it that are targeted at the different levels of my students but with the overall level and learning objective of the class in mind. For example, at the beginning of the year the mistakes will mostly be capital letters and missing ending punctuation. As the year goes on and we learn about different conventions and spelling patterns, the mistakes start getting harder (but I always put in a few "easier" mistakes for students who are still working on those skills).

It only takes me a couple of minutes to write a class letter each morning, but the difference in the engagement of the students is huge! We correct the letter as a whole group. Usually, I call on about five students from my jar o' sticks. If they are stuck, they can call on a friend to help them out. After that, I start calling on volunteers since the mistakes that are left are usually the more challenging ones. Here's an example of a letter (everything in blue is what we edited):

Now, you may be thinking what a great idea this is, but wait! Here's the best part! We add sounds and gestures for our punctuation! I got this idea after taking a great workshop on whole brain and body learning. The class was such a great reminder to incorporate visual, oral and kinesthetic elements into teaching. But how do you do that with something like DOL? Well, I have to give credit to Victor Borge here. Yep, that's right. Victor Borge's famous routine about phonetic punctuation. This video is 4 minutes and 37 seconds, but you'll get the idea after about a minute and a half—although I highly recommend watching the whole thing just because it's funny:

I don't use all the same sounds and gestures as Mr. Borge, but you get the idea. And the best part is that the kids L.O.V.E. it. When I am conferencing with kids during writing time, they can't always say, "Oh, I need an apostrophe there," but they can definitely make the sound and gesture for it!

If you decide to use this idea in your classroom, let me know how it works for you!