OWI Q and A

I will publish all OWI/WCTG questions here and later compile them into a Q&A book. This will serve as excellent supplemental material for anyone working with the Triangle, Square, or Star books.

Here’s the first one:

Q: I love One Word Images (OWIs), but picking a random object to start feels risky. What if the word we choose isn’t interesting, and we only realize it after we’ve already started drawing?

A: I have definitely experienced that flat feeling in class! When it happens, I simply pivot and start over with a new word. The students don’t mind at all—they actually love the process of picking the words.

Pivoting is easy when you prioritize teaching the language as a whole over forcing a rigid list of required vocabulary words. Don’t stress about abandoning a pre-planned lesson; studies show that students taught with Comprehensible Input (CI) end the year with much larger vocabularies than those who just memorize word lists; it’s not even close.