I've been using the I Do, We Do, You Do approach to help my students learn new skills, and the We Do part has mostly been their favorite. With my second-grade students, we've been diving into character analysis—thinking deeply about characters and identifying words that describe them. To determine character traits, we looked closely at a character’s actions, words, thoughts, and feelings. As a fun way to solidify our understanding, we decided to write a skit to show what we had learned. The We Do was a very enjoyable experience for all of us.
We started by thinking of character traits that we thought were easy to write about and perform. We needed to remember that our characters had to show their traits through words, actions, and feelings. The students were so excited that they ended up writing two skits because they couldn't choose just one idea! Working together, we wrote simple scripts. Through this process, the students quickly realized that we need to write dialogue as well as what the characters were doing in the scene. We also realized that the supporting characters in the skit had traits, too. The students practiced the skits a few times, made some tweaks to the script, and then recorded the skits. We played the videos for second graders that work down the hall in the LRC room. We asked these students to describe our characters by thinking about the characters' actions, words, and feelings and then what character traits they would assign to each character.
As an interventionist, time is very valuable, and I always feel I don't have enough time to finish all I want to, but my students had so much fun during the whole process. They particularly liked their peers looking at their work and discussing with them the character traits we hoped were conveyed through the skits. I wish I had taken more pictures to document the process. If the opportunity presents itself again, I will remember to document it.
The "I do, We do, You do" method involves the gradual release of responsiblilty from the teacher to the student.