TPRS Year 3 - Planning backwards from novels

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to be trying out teaching this year by planning out the year with first choosing the novels I want my kids to read, and then backwards plan what structures I need to teach them.

There's a very talented teacher that I have the privilege of working with on this project, Josef Sallen.  He's in his second year as a teacher and we are both the foreign language departments at our small schools.

We decided to choose some different novels for our two levels of Spanish classes.  I opted to not read the Blaine Ray stories.  Nothing against Blaine Ray.  He obviously has been amazing in creating a method of teaching that I (and my students) have fallen in love with.  But they tend to be somewhat repetitive in plot.

So Josef Sallen and I picked some novels and looked at the structures in the novels.  Then we decided how our year would look (more or less) with the different novels in the different levels.  Obviously the novels are written for students (taught with TPRS).  But it would be nice to work the kids up to some actual novels by Spanish 3 or 4.  For now though, it's nice to have something to work towards. We did the first 4-5 weeks of the semester with PQA (getting to know you activiity).  Then we did TPR of some of the structures from the book.  Then we did a few weeks of TPRS with spoken stories in the past and embedded readings in the present.  The idea was to get them ready to be able to read most of the first book before we even read it.  So for both classes we chose, Agentes Secretos by Mira Canion.

I'll let you know how it goes.