TPRS year 2 - Working with novels

So this next year, another teacher and I decided that we should really work a lot more with the readings in teaching through TPRS since increasing the students' literacy is what will really help them acquire the language much better than anything else.

There are all sorts of TPRS novels that use 200 or so high frequency words or less.

We decided to choose a few novels for each level and then teach backwards and determine the structures in each novel that we should then teach to the students so by the time we read the novels, the students will feel more like it's easy to read.  I think this will also help me not feel like I am just taking random structures and teaching them just because.  It will help me have more of a sense of purpose to my teaching with TPRS.

The first two years I worked with TPRS, I really was working more on the form such as: circling, PQA, going slow, teaching to the eyes, and other things mentioned in TPRS workshops as well as Ben Slavic's books.

But this last year I really felt as though I hadn't done an adequate enough job of getting my students about to read a novel.  So this year we'll work harder on getting to that goal.

This also coincides nicely with something my school wanted to encourage with the Native / Heritage Spanish speakers.  There are some who know Spanish and had to learn English after immigrating to the US that never were able to learn how to understand what they read in grade school.  By the time they get to high school, this skill has become more and more necessary in classes.  So if I can help the Native / Heritage speakers to read in Spanish and work on things like talking about the main character and plot points, etc, then this will also help them in their English (Literature) classes as well as other classes where synthesizing information that has been read is an integral part of the class.

I'll be slowly charting out my plan(s) for the year as I figure them out.  I recently ordered about $90 worth of TPRS novels from tprspublishing... hopefully I can find some to plan with.