Día 10 - TPRS

Wow, I can definitely see how people who like to plan things would have a problem with TPRS.  The more you plan a story, the more you limit what the students can do with it.

As I've learned, since you're working with structures, you can teach those and regardless of where the story leads, the students are using the structures.  It's win-win.

Today I could not have told you where my stories would have gone!  My classes attempted to finish up the stories that we started yesterday.  The stories got very elaborate in some classes.  I love how you get to throw in high frequency description words into the stories to help make them more interesting.

Based on the same structures and similar start to the story, these are things we learned about today.


In one class, a girl wanted to have 2.4 babies.  In the same class a boy got a new gigantic television from another boy who wanted to have a dollar and he gave him a dollar.

In another class, a boy went to Six Flags dancing slowly (or slow dancing) with another student.  He later went to a Hooter's (because the students didn't think I would take that suggestion!) walking like Steve Urkel quickly.

In another class, a boy went to Taco Bell where Gerard Butler happened to have 900 green cats and he gave them to the boy!

In another class, I was most surprised when a girl who wanted 16 tall African American boys went to St. Louis because there were lots of gigantic squirrels in Sonic (where she was).  She went to St Louis kissing the air quickly.  She then later went (at the suggestion of a student) to Church's Chicken walking like a chicken slowly.

When storytelling, it is very important to know your audience.  My students are getting better at playing the game every day.  But they still need suggestions from the teacher that are outlandish or normal to build up more vocabulary.

So far, the hardest class for me to connect with has been the middle schoolers.  They don't quite seem to be as engaged as the high school students with this method and I think it is because I am not quite as in touch with their culture to grab their attention.  But I'm still learning about this method, so we'll see.

It's definitely more exciting for me as a teacher to come into class and feel the excitement from the students as they tell the stories with me.