Twenty-six fables and about thirty-nine school weeks. That arithmetic is not an accident: one fable a week gets you through the whole alphabet with a comfortable margin for the weeks when nothing goes to plan.
Here is the structure, which takes twelve minutes and needs nothing prepared.
Monday: meet the animal
Show the picture. Say the letter. Say the word in gold. Then read the fable, four verses, about four minutes.
Then one question: what should the animal have done?
Then stop. The stopping is the technique and it is the part adults find hardest. Count to five in your head. Somebody will fill it, and what they say will be better than anything you had planned.
Wednesday: sing it
The song, twice. Once for listening, once for joining. A class that hears a song once has heard a song. A class that hears it twice owns it.
By the second time the back row is in, which is the only measure that matters.
Friday: do something with it
Rotate three activities and no more. Children like the shape being the same and the story being different, which is the opposite of what most adults assume.
- The vote. Was the animal wrong, hands up. The children who vote against the moral are the ones paying attention.
- The other ending. In pairs, thirty seconds, a version where the animal behaves. Hear three. They get sillier and that is a feature.
- Colour and name. The poster, and the child writes the letter and the word on it themselves.
The week nothing goes to plan
There will be four or five of those a term. A fire drill, a visitor, a child who is sick on the carpet at the wrong moment.
Do not restart the alphabet. Do not double up the following week to catch the letter you lost. Skip it and come back to it in the spare weeks at the end, which is exactly what the margin between twenty-six fables and thirty-nine school weeks is for.
A plan that has to be perfect is a plan that ends in October.
The wall
One poster a week, in a row, at child height. By the summer the alphabet goes round the room and every child can point at one they did.
This is the part visitors comment on and the part the children actually care about, and it costs a sheet of paper a week.
Why a week and not a day
A day is not long enough for the word to escape the classroom. A week is. Somewhere around Thursday a child uses the word in the playground, about somebody, incorrectly and at volume, and that is the moment it has stopped being a lesson and become vocabulary.
You cannot make that happen faster. You can only leave the word out for long enough.
What it needs
One copy of the storybook for the room. The songs, karaoke, games and colouring pages are downloads, so one set runs a whole class. The full thing is $49.95 during the launch.
If there is no budget at all, and I hear from a great many classrooms where there is not, take the twenty-six colouring posters for free and use Aesop from the library for the stories. The structure above works with any fable. It is the shape that does the work, not the book.
The twelve activities that come with the set are written up here.