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Saturday, January 12, 2019

Weekend Chat idea

I was talking to THE Bill VanPatten a lot this week about Second Language Acquisition and the possibility of working on some projects together soon.

In one of our convos, he brought up a way he had done Weekend Chat in the past. Now, the way I typically do weekend chat in levels 1 and 2 (where I normally end up teaching for whatever reason), has varied a little bit and evolved since I was doing more textbook teaching.

In level 2, I would use it to practice the preterit and have each student look through the textbook and write 3 things that they did over the weekend. I would check their conjugations and would ask them to share them with the class in Spanish. Then we would move on to something else after we finished.


Give a few options but allow them to talk about anything.
Then, when I started with TPRS, I would have three things I did over the weekend (sometimes in a short story of sorts) and would slowly reveal those words and find others to compare and contrast with myself (see this blog post, this one or this one).

Then, this evolved into having a slide with a word or two I could ask the class about of a high frequency word, but then show a formula.

I’ve heard about another other cool variations from people which entails writing various activities on the board and having the students putting their name next to anything they did. Then talking about it.

You also could have some “I” statements about what I did on the weekend and have students stand/sit, or walk/jump from one side of the class (for yes) to the other (for no). Then you could ask follow-up questions.

I liked Bill’s idea too though to add a little bit of variety.

He would have the students write down what they did on small pieces of paper and he would select a couple and have the class guess who it was talking about. I love this to help foster more of a sense of community in the classroom. Then he might ask those students follow up questions.

I also like this for the nerdy purpose of getting in the 3rd person, 1st and 2nd person forms as well and the mystery of who did it.

Check out Bill VanPatten's old podcast Tea with BVP or his new one Talkin' L2 with BVP!

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