TPRS Year 3 - Days 1 and 2

Well, school just got back into full swing as we returned to having students on Tuesday.  My goals this year are to worry less about the actual storytelling (because it seems to be coming more and more naturally) and to instead worry about my students.  Last year I noticed I did better at monitoring students' lack of understanding.  That seems to be more heightened this year.

The first day went very well.  I think I got the idea from Ben Slavic to teach the first day while slowly teaching the classroom expectations during the first week or two.  Most kids aren't going to listen anyway if you just give them a list of rules the first day.  I wouldn't listen if someone did that to me.  So the idea is to show that everyday we will be learning Spanish (even on the first day).  This helps me set the tone for the year.  It also is very common that teachers might think of the first day where they don't have to teach very much and they can use it as a sort of day off.  I would rather be teaching though than babysitting.  If I am babysitting the kids, there are always more personality conflicts and kids not doing what they should be doing.  I think the best way to have a "day off" (of classroom management problems) is to teach.  When kids are engaged, they cause fewer problems.

For Spanish 1 and 8th grade, they drew a picture of something that they like to do and we started talking about me and how "The teacher plays guitar" (in Spanish).  Then we circled that information a little bit.  Afterwards, I moved on to a student or two and compared and contrasted their activities to mine.  This is another idea I have gotten (and used before) from Ben Slavic.  The more I do it, the better I get at throwing out more language to the students in a comprehensible way and also doing more short grammar explanations.

For Spanish 2, I had them draw two pictures about what they did over the summer.  The idea was to review stuff from last year while throwing in some new information and getting to re-familiarize myself with them.  I did notice that I would throw in some structures from last year and check for comprehension and most of my students from last year would remember those structures.  The only difficulty is that I have students who had the previous Spanish teacher (the year before I came) and they have no clue what we're talking about.  They did grammar-based homework out of the textbook all year.  Guess how great that was for their acquisition of the language!  Yep.  Not so great.  So they are keeping me mindful of making sure I do go slow and point and review even more so the structures from last year.

All in all, they were both good days.  On day 2, we continued the activities and they'll probably take me a few weeks to finish.  If I finish early in a class with getting to know everyone, hopefully we'll have plenty of fodder from different things we talked about to create short narratives or I can do some one-word images.  I already notice myself going off on tangents and asking about the names of the chicken they play soccer with or anything else that might be relevant to make it interesting.

Día 55 - Games

When I first started, I would do games all the time!  I mean, seriously.  We played games two times a week.  Sometimes if we could get through a book lesson quickly enough we would play games more often.  The most popular was always Matamoscas.  Then I learned about other games and have slowly been adding them in here and there.

The following is a list of games I compiled for someone on moretprs.net in a way to catalog some of the games that I've done in the past.  I would love to attribute them to people who came up with them. But I don't really remember where I got some of them from.

Here are a couple I have used over the years:

A. Caramba
Here's a brief explanation... if you have technology it makes it a little easier and you don't waste paper but I did it back before I had a projector. (download ppt)

• You make cards (slides) of different vocab.
• Then you insert some cards that say "Caramba" on them and scramble it all up. ( I usually do 10 Caramba cards/slides)
• you have students in teams
• have teams elect a representative (this is the person you will listen to)
• you show the vocab word (or show English word) or even something from a TPRS story and have them translate or finish or true or false... anything
• if they get it right, they get a point and they may continue or stop
• if they stop, they keep all the points they have accumulated for that round and never lose them for the duration of the game
• if they continue they keep going until they: 1) stop, 2) miss one 3) get a 'Caramba'
• if they get one wrong or a 'Caramba'; their turn is over and they lose any points from that round
• my kids have a love/hate relationship with this game.

B. Conecta 4

• I made a powerpoint and it's a tad tricky but it plays like the game 'Connect 4" with two teams
• instructions are included in powerpoint (slide 1)
• (download template ppt)

C. ¿Dónde está Wally?

• in previous years I used this to practice place vocab
• if you have tech, I have a PowerPoint template (download ppt)
• if you don't have any tech, you can print out pictures of places and glue them onto a piece of heavier paper with a small pocket at the bottom and then insert some different waldos into the pockets randomly. Have those pictures taped on the board and have the students guess.
• they write down their answers and if they are right, they get a point
• to build suspense I go person to person and ask "¿Dónde está Wally?" and they have to tell me a guess... then as a class we see if they were right or not

D. Jeopardy

• I have a powerpoint template (download ppt)
• if you don't have tech in your classroom, you can always write number values on the board with the categories and have a notecard with the questions and answers. I've done both and either one is successful with the students.

E. Sentence scramble

• I've come up with sentences and the cut them all up and had the students try to put them back together beforehand timed
• the group that gets the most wins

F. Crossword puzzle w/ clues

• I projected a crossword on the board w/ an overhead and then had each team with a different marker color. They were given clues for the words (in Spanish) on a piece of paper and then they had to figure out what the word was. One person could come up to the board from each team at a time to write a word in there.
• the winning team had the most words filled in correctly
• you can make free crossword puzzles at http://www.armoredpenguin.com and then project the pdf file saved to your computer without the clues on the board

G. Scrabble

• I made my own little scrabble sets on cut up card stock paper/notecards
• I made sure there were plenty of letters as well
• students drew like 15 letters at the beginning and always got 2-3 blanks at the beginning as well.
• first student would place a word down
• students would build off of that word (like in Scrabble)
• they would keep building off the of the words
• the winners had: 1) most words or 2) longest word

H. ¿Dónde está mi _?

• last year I had a student walk out of the class and stay in the hall... when they came back the other students had hidden one of their items... students then had to describe the person who took it.
• this could be adapted to describe body characteristics, clothing, locations like 'near' 'far' 'above' 'below' etc

I. steal the bacon

• if you're covering vocabulary... I liked printing out pictures last year when first introducing vocab. 
• After introducing it on the first day or second day, we had the students compete to grab the vocabulary word on a piece of paper before the other... this is an incredibly fun thing for them even at the high school age.... I just had them keep score...
• seriously, even though it's simple... students LOVE the competition

J. Memoria

• cards of things with pictures and spanish words or translation and spanish words
• students play memory with the cards
• take turns flipping them over; looking for matches
• if they get matches they may continue looking

K. pesca ("go fish")

• play 'go fish' with cards... I usually had the object and the picture or just the picture of the object
• rules of 'go fish' apply
• "tienes _? (do you have)
• Sí... o pesca

L. Matamoscas (Flyswatter game) 
this is my favorite game of all time

• write vocabulary words on transparency
• divide group into two teams
• each team gets a flyswatter
• one person from each team goes up to the board and stands on opposite sides of the board
• instructor calls out a a word (opposite of the language on the board) and students race to hit it with the flyswatter
• student who hits the word first gets a point for their team
• students get two misses... if they miss twice, the instructor counts backwards from 15... if they do not get the word, no point awarded
• if students do not know the words, their teammates can call out directions in Spanish (which are written on the board)
• really good directions can get another team points as well
• usually students stay up for two different rounds