Cuentas Conmigo (Story 5) - Carlos Prickly

Hey everyone.

I had a yearning to do something fun that can be released to the masses since my other creative project (Súper Lápiz) is only for Voces Digital consumers..., and was inspired to do another Cuentas Conmigo story on Youtube on my storytelling channel.

The idea of Cuentas Conmigo (if you're new around here), is that it's basically a TPRS® story that is done completely through feedback via the comments section on Youtube.

There is a new episode each Monday and this requires voting on the question at the end to be done by Wednesday. I foresee this being used by classes, or learners of any kind who want to practice Spanish in context.

This is the 5th story like it so far. The most popular was probably with Juan Cena. Nevertheless, I have been proud of each and every one of them.


Here are some ways this one is new though!

• Narrator is voiced by a Native Speaker
• I wrote a theme-song
• I think my style is getting more established as I do these

Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for free Teacher notes on the first episode which includes some ideas on how to use the series, episode and even has a short quiz or guided notes page for students.*

And I hope you and your classes will tell the story along with me!

Check out episode 1 in the present or past tenses!

*I'm selling the other ones to hopefully eventually offset the cost of paying a native speaker narrator for each episode.

See previous Cuentas Conmigo stories on these playlists.

FLAM encore presentation - Stay on Target

Here are my presentation slides for my encore presentation from FLAM with links to what I mentioned!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_jfUujjoeDHUEx1ZnVwNE1QaTg

All my Spanish 2016-17 resources

Ok, so I like to be transparent with my teaching.

I am not perfect and don't claim to be. For me it's about the journey and wonder of learning the language in pieces with my students.

This year went well considering the following challenges:

• Spanish 2 students were all over the place in ability when they got to my class
• Spanish 1 students were those who
• transferred into school system
• didn't get good enough grades to take Spanish 1 in middle school
• students who had previously failed Spanish 1
• my going back to 50 minute periods after 3 years of 90 minute every other day block
• being at a new school (zero street cred)
• new district mandated curriculum ("cough textbook chapters cough")

Don't get me wrong, there were also SO many positives.

• supportive school department (TPRS lovers)
• lots of collaboration
• administrative support and faith in my abilities
• students slowly being won over
• trying a lot of new things
• not HAVING to teach curriculum based on a weekly map
• teach towards final

Sufficed to say, I think I got my students to buy into the method and to learn about one another and Spanish at the same time. There were ups and downs (like every year). But in general I thought my students rose to the occasion and many of them couldn't believe how much they were speaking in Spanish by the end of the year in both levels! 

• Here's what I did in Spanish 1 + hyperlinks galore.
• NOW available in FRENCH (translated by Bess Hayles for her classes).
• And here's what I did for Spanish 2 + hyperlinks galore.

Feel free to look, copy things into your own google drive to use,  let me know if you have further questions. My finals were district mandated so I have not included those.

Selena - el chico del apto 512 - revised

So this is a mini-unit I like to use each year in Spanish 1. I originally got it from Martina Bex years ago as I mention here (from 5 years ago!) and it has evolved over the years to use whatever words I have needed at the moment.

I love how I can incorporate music and also tell a story. This story by Martina actually has inspired me to use other songs to make into storylines. Of course one of my all time favorites each year in Spanish 1 is: Fanny Lu - Celos.  I've also done the same with Sr. Wooly's awesome song: Puedo ir al baño (this year's version).

See this year's activities here for Spanish 1 for "Celos".

So back to "el chico del apartamento 512". It's a song by Selena that has a cute little story about a girl who keeps having guys want to talk to her and she isn't interested. Finally she sees a guy come out of the elevator and he's the man of her dreams!

We listen to the song for a few days as a warm up with different activities to interact with the song in different ways, which preps them for the second week and the actual story that is adapted from the song, thanks to Martina.  I made a powerpoint of it and this year pushed way more language.

I made an embedded reading of about 3 versions or so. If you see phrases in there that aren't in my structures, it's because I had previously used those at some point and was recycling them back in to remind my students of them for additional help binding them to long-term memory.

Here's my basic plan that took about 2 weeks!  Of course remember I also a few other activities in class so we might do the TPR / storytelling part for 25-30 minutes a period. Best of luck if you use it!

It's usually a pretty big hit with my students since there is the music component as well as the compelling story of love and mystery. I am excited that this will build up nicely towards the last story of the year. I am going to adapt Kara Jacob's AWESOME song choice from first semester this year: "Soy Yo" by Bomba Estéreo.

And here's the Selena song if you've somehow never heard it!

TPRS Presentation in nearby District

So my francophone* colleague Bess Hayles and I were invited to give demo TPRS lessons in a nearby school district.

After that we gave a talk about Comprehensible Input to those interested. There were about 24 teachers that attended and they were a very fun and kind group of teachers.

We taught 90 minute blocks and my Spanish 1 students were great kids. They were very respectful but quite unsure of me since I am so weird.  By the end of the class though, I was able to win quite a few of them over.


While I was incredibly nervous, the teachers and students were gracious to us and I couldn't have asked for a nicer group to do my first TPRS model lesson and co-lead a professional development session.


Here's what I did in my lesson plan, not knowing what to do for a Spanish 1 class, and I didn't get through it all.

Comprehensible Input with the MONO

Hay un mono. (from first episode)

So I have met various educators over the last year or two who have told me how much their classes have enjoyed a little story I made about a "mono" (monkey).

Backstory:
I thought it would be fun to make a super simple TPRS like story about a character that wanted something and didn't have it and so they went to the 3 locations. And as I drew one day on my iPad, suddenly I had a monkey, an island, and Antarctica. From there the first "mono" story was born!

Since then, I have had teachers who have met me at conferences (or have told me via email) how much their classes have enjoyed the story.

Response to Chris Cashman - part 3 - Assessment

Quick history lesson:
Chris Cashman asked me about TPRS and why I use it. I responded here.
Chris proposed a response asking about assessment here.
I responded in part 1 about why the grammar vids here.
Part 2 of my response dealt with learning vs acquisition as I understand it here. I have put Chris' text in blue so you know whose words belong to whom.

And here is part three on: Assessment

You’ll notice that I have taken a LONG time to write this response. I have tried so many times in my head to respond and also tried so many times to write a coherent response. And I keep coming up dry. But I know that you’re patiently waiting to have a dialogue about this. So here is my best effort. I admit you’ll probably see facets that you don’t agree with me and that is completely fine. You’re the master of your own classroom and I wouldn’t want to tell you what you HAVE to do. You have to come to that on your own.

I thought it was so important to address my issues with teaching before coming to TPRS and after implementing TPRS in this first post because until you understand my journey, you’ll have a hard time seeing how I have such a hard time with assessment.

Response to Chris Cashman - part 1 - Why the grammar videos?

Background info: Chris asked me a question and I responded here. He then asked me a question about how I assess on this post. Here is my response broken up into more manageable chunks. Chris' portion is in blue.

Chris,

Thank you for your kind words both about my blog entry and my videos. It means a lot that we are still able to dialogue about this considering that for some, a wall is quickly built that can never be crossed by either side when someone teaches differently.

I appreciate your taking the time to write such a well thought out response. It shows me how much you really care about what you are doing and I bet your students are incredibly thankful for you!

I’m going to be very honest from the get-go in this response that I don’t have many of the answers that you might seek. I appreciate your challenging me in those so that I might be able to further grow in those areas.

How do I teach my classes these days?

If you're in the Spanish Teachers in the U.S. Facebook group, you might have seen this question to me by a talented teacher: Chris Cashman:

Señor Jeremy Jordan​​, el grande, el honorable y majestuoso:

I read the great article about your recognition posted by an admin. I noticed that the day the reporter was present, you were doing a TPRS style lesson. However, you are well-known for your videos of verb conjugations and explicit grammar (albeit presented in a super fun and attention grabbing way).

These two camps of people -- TPRS folks and learn-the-verb-chart folks -- tend to belong in different camps. One group believes that students will learn things gradually over time with repeated exposure, so don't worry about the verb charts and certainly don't assess knowledge of them. The other believes that language learning can indeed be aided by explicit grammar teaching.

I know I'm hugely overgeneralizing an issue here, but you're showing some evidence of perhaps having found a middle ground, or a way to merge the two worlds. Would you mind sharing either in a blog entry, or a response here in this group, of the method to your madness, the thinking/theory behind it? I have my own answer, but I'm *mega*interested in seeing/hearing yours!

Don't mean to put you on the spot, but this really caught my attention.

Of course the article he is referring to is this one where I was interviewed at my school after winning Missouri Foreign Language Teacher of the year.

Here is my lengthy response to Chris. I appreciate his question. I hope that it is understood that I am not telling anyone how they should teach. I am only expressing what informs instruction in MY classroom.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How to start the year with TPRS (part 2) - PQA - day 1

*I meant to post this a long time ago. It is part two of this post*

So if you saw my part one post with TPR, then you should have an idea of what TPRS originally suggested teachers do to get the students familiar with action verbs and commands that could later be worked seamlessly into stories and help students to express themselves a little bit more in the storytelling phase.

Something I had the opportunity to play around with in my 8th grade exploratory classes the past two years was the idea of PQA.

PQA stands for Personalized Questions and Answers.  If you get a chance, I think Ben Slavic explains this the best in his blog or in any of his books!

This is how I do it:

The first day of class, I have my students draw a picture of what they like to do and then write their name in the top corner. They can write what it is in English underneath if they think I won't know what it is.

After I get attendance figured out, I start walking around and looking around.  I am developing ideas of where I can go that day in Spanish.  If I have two basketball players, I could talk about them on the same day and compare and contrast them.  Or I could talk about one on one day and the other on a different day to review the structures: "s/he plays" and "basketball".

Once I'm ready to start, I go over to the board and I write (Spanish in black and English in blue):
    el profesor toca la guitarra.
      the teacher plays the guitar.

Then I say this slowly while pointing to each word.  I move my arms down from above my head to down to my sides (this is my signal for new information).

Once my students look at me like I am crazy I tell them in English:
Me: Oh, right.  This is your first day.  Whenever I say something like this new in Spanish, you are going to pretend like it's the most interesting thing in your whole life.  To do that you'll say, "Ooooooh."
Let's try that again.  El profesor toca la guitarra.  
Class: OOOOOOH.


Then I keep talking about myself by circling the information until students get it easily and we can add more information.  Usually at that point I start talking about another student.  Maybe another student plays an instrument.  Maybe they play a sport.  I will write on the board what they do in black and the English translation underneath in blue/green.

Then I compare/contrast myself with someone else. The first day I stick to a lot of yes/no questions and occasionally a who/what question.

The first day or two I don't do a whole lot with multiple verb forms. As I go with the PQA, I might slowly let it trickle in that if a person wants to say "I [..]", that the action will end in an "o" instead.

It has only gotten better and sweeter each year. I have found more ways to get the kids exposed to the "you" and "i" forms. I should still try to add in the "they" forms a little when more than one does something. But it's really about the kids and not about the grammar, or else it wouldn't be successful.  Sometimes though, it can be hard when the kids almost have to be trained to be interested in each other's lives.

NTPRS day 3 - More Russian, Acting, Being quiet, Reading, Making a Movietalk & Russian Mafia

*this is my attempt to keep track of what happened while I was at my very first NTPRS in Reno, Nevada 

Russian - day 3
So day 3 of the conference and Russian. I think by this point, I was going in whenever possible for the Russian, but was trying to discreetly leave when it was time for coaching practice. This is nothing against the coaches or groups. I just realized that I could be doing other things (talking to other educators, just taking a break to think about my coming year and the vocab lists, etc).

So anyway, I was starting to drag by this time in the week. My roomie and I weren't averaging much of sleep a night. I was probably getting 4-5 hours a night and it was wearing on me. On breaks I was calling my family because I missed them dearly so I wasn't really getting a lot of sleep and I could slowly feel it more and more each day.

I walk into the class and Katya had chosen me the day before for acting, and I had really wanted to act on previous days because I have never been the main character in a story during a TPRS training workshop thus far.  But I figured that I had been chosen to be Lady Gaga the day before and I could just relax in the back.  For whatever reason, Katya just asks me to go up immediately and act out a story.

My first official TPRS presentation to colleagues

Today I was given the wonderful opportunity to share a little bit about TPRS with some of my new colleagues (at my new school). I think that it was an overall positive experience.  Just like in my classes, I over-planned and some things under-planned.

Here's a PDF and here's a PowerPoint file if you would like to see them.

But here's a rundown on the good and bad for me in case I ever do something similar again:

TPRS - year 5 - my 3 areas to improve on

Wow, I can't believe I am in year 5 of teaching with TPRS and CI.  I am probably going more towards CI while bringing in TPRS, since CI gives me the option to find more extensions than just stories.

I'm pretty excited about this year so far.  It's my second year in a big high school with a Spanish department.  We're slowly shifting towards a more TPRS/CI friendly curriculum, which is exciting.  We were all quite excited about our Spanish 1 students last year and their abilities in the language compared to previous years with more traditional curriculum.

This year I am trying to improve in a few areas.  I've been gleaning ideas from other teachers.

The three main focal points for my teaching this year are:

1. Policing eye-contact better (while going slowly)
2. Contacting parents more frequently (with good and bad reports as needed)
3. having notebooks for my writers to write in from the beginning of the year with the PQA activity

There are more things I am tweaking this year, but those are the three big ones I am working on, on a daily basis.

I hope to be more effective and inspire more students in their acquisition of the language than last year.  I noticed that since I didn't police eye-contact very well, I lost some students in a way that they were unable to recover in class last year.

Wish me luck!

Monkey story #2! SNEAK PEEK!

Here's a continuation of the monkey story to help people learn Spanish in a simple, repetitive way.



I'm pretty excited.  In this storyline, I'll be using the following while reviewing the structures from the previous series...

come - s/he eats
quiere comer - s/he wants to eat
le dice - s/he says to him/her
tiene - s/he has
con - with

I also throw in some "I" and "you" forms of some of the words in conversation, but I think it will still be comprehensible... [fingers crossed]

While it seems incredibly complicated, these are things I tried to draw pictures for and always, always, always, offer subtitles for so it's not just up to the learner to figure it out.

I'm enjoying making these and hope people can find them useful in their own personal study or for teachers and their classes.

see first story here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBk-rU5Lj1Y&list=PLPD6O-TouCqQXu4LDPOnzAUGDh7r3G7TV

Noticias (news report)

I sometimes find that on Mondays (or Monday-like Tuesdays), I have a hard time getting into storytelling and PQA.

In previous years I swore by the weekend chat.  I haven't done that as much this year.  Maybe I should resurrect it.

Once I can get into a rhythm of a 1-2 week plan, that might be easier so I know what structures to PQA for the first day of the cycle.

Currently though, I don't have a lot that I have to accomplish and we've been reading some TPRS novels and doing extension activities.  But you can only talk about a short book so much!

So today I resurrected something I did two years back once or twice about a news report.

The idea was I found 3 news stories over the weekend and then tried to put them in digestible chunks to explain to my students in differentiating language.  I had some language goals I was working to accomplish (moreso with Spanish 2).  And I was working to expose my Spanish 1's to -ndo and some present perfect and to the verb pensar (to think).

My Spanish 1 students are stronger in Comprehensible Input since it's their first year in Spanish and we are using it, while my Spanish 2 students were taught more traditionally last year and they have a harder time with the CI due to learning through a different method last year.

Here are the powerpoints, feel free to take the idea and run with it.

For the most part, it went well and I didn't have to have as much energy to tell a story, but we got our brain breaks by having them walk to different parts of the room to see which person thought what answer was right.

The activity took about 30-35 minutes.  I could have added a quiz, but I did a quiz for the chapter in the novels we read afterwards.

I might try to resurrect this more often every few weeks.

See Spanish 1 news: here
See Spanish 2 news: here

Block Scheduling

Oh man... so this year at my new school, after 7 years of teaching, I feel new all over again in so many ways.

Block scheduling is really a game changer.

We teach 4 - 90 minute classes each day.  While I don't agree with this philosophy, I just have to do what I have to do to help my kids learn as much Spanish as they can in those 90 minutes.

But I feel like there is a point at which class ceases to be productive in a 90 minute class.

So what have I done so far?  This is the flow I have tried to create.  I am working on getting better at giving Brain Breaks because if I don't give them to my students, they'll take them anyways and not pay attention.

New Web Series - Learning Spanish through Stories

Hello everyone!

So I found myself over Thanksgiving relaxing and drawing on my Ipad, only to realize that I could make sub-par drawings and narrate them in Spanish, after some tweaking on the computer.  And Voila!  I have my very own Comprehensible Input videos that will slowly get more complicated each video to help learners acquire the language versus working on the grammar out-rightly.

The best part, they'll be short and each will cover a structure as we tell a story.  I'll then recycle that structure in future videos.

Each story will be about 10 episodes long and then we'll move on to a different story.  The structures will get increasingly more difficult as we go and eventually I would imagine some pretty intense storylines.

Here's the first video & second video starting from scratch!  I think I'll do a version in English as well.

Let me know what you think!  I'm excited and I think it turned out kind of neat!

Read about my first storytelling venture from a few years back:
http://profesoranonimo.blogspot.com/2012/07/tprs-year-2-online-storytelling.html

or see my first and second interactive storytelling attempts on Youtube:
story 1 & story 2

TPRS year 4 - block schedule (revisited)

So I proposed a question, very unsure of myself before school started.  I now work in a school with a foreign language department that consists of more than one person (myself).

In addition, our classes are not 50 minutes like in my previous schools.  They are 90 minutes and meet every other day (alternating).   So I have 3 classes (& 1 prep) every day. I'm not complaining about the 1.5 hour prep everyday!  But I have 3 classes every day for 90 minutes.  Since there are other teachers in the department, I am a Spanish 1 & 2 teacher.

So I am back to report that I have been doing the following for class, which I'll do for the next few weeks.

5 minutes - warm up on board reviewing previously discussed words, sentences, etc
5-10 minutes - basic conversational skills with kids
25 minutes - TPR (Total Physical Response)
5 minutes-  TPR closed-eye quiz
20 minutes - PQA (getting to know you activity in Spanish)
2 minutes - brain break (in English is fine)
20-23 minutes - PQA (getting to know you activity)
5 minutes - PQA Yes/No quiz
0-3 minutes - extra time to pass out papers, chat with students in Spanish/English. Down time for them before next class

And it has been working pretty well.  I didn't do the brain break for the students for the first two or so days and I have found that it really did help their concentration after the 20 minute point.  I must remember it's 90% Spanish and even if they understood Spanish, they would need a brain break after 20 minutes.

My students are retaining the body part words + actions from TPR as the closed-eye quizzes would suggest.
And they are ok to change gears in the PQA conversational section where we talk about the other students. The best part is being able to incorporate words from TPR into the PQA to enrich it and get more passes of the structures in a new context.

But I'm sure they won't want to TPR for the rest of the year for 25-30 minutes each day.  It does wear you out after awhile.

TPRS year 4 - likening TPRS & CI to music

I was thinking about explaining TPRS and CI teaching to the Spanish teachers in the department at my new school. 

It occurred to me that if we can compare learning a language to learning how to play music, the parallels are quite striking. 

So there are different ways to go about learning how to play an instrument. I remember being in band when I was younger, and learned how to play guitar in college.

When I was in band, we might so scales every once in awhile, but we would spend most of our time playing songs and parts of songs.  We would continually play the songs over and over and over again. 

The scales were used to help us in our accuracy of the notes as well as speed.  But after simply playing different songs over and over, we would slowly get better. 

When I learned guitar, I would take songs I wanted to know how to play and I would play them over and over. 

I never became a professional musician doing this but I can play a number of songs and slowly developed more rhythm. As I listen to music, I tend to listen to how a song is played and I can always add that in to my style.  

Imagine going to a class where the teacher only taught you about the instrument and all the pieces to it and what each individual piece is used for.  Then a few times they showed you how to play one or two notes on it and expected that you would be able to figure out three notes more even an entire song!

I would think that's how many view traditional (grammar-based) instruction in the foreign language classroom.  We do very little for our students in modeling the actual language being used in context, but instead give them the isolated parts, and then maybe give them drills to do. But our hope is that they will produce more than we have taught them in the language.

So I liked this metaphor or the instrument and band because it's how I learned guitar.  I learned first how to use the language through the whole (a song) and then later added music theory to my understanding as I was interested in why (grammar).  In this way, I am not paralyzed with fear to play the guitar because strumming just for fun comes naturally since that is the way I learned.  I didn't just learn scales and constant drills first,...

And as far as teaching Spanish, I really enjoy using TPRS and CI as this other way of giving the kids all the language possible (in context and simplified as needed) to help slowly build them up.  

And I've found that when they're ready, they "make music".