Templates for additional activities

First semester flew by and I wasn't able to get into the rhythm that I like to create until this semester since we were still using the first 10-15 minutes of class interviewing a student (very basically about one thing they like to do) until we finished talking about everyone.

But I like to establish a routine with some additional activities. I'm only doing Spanish 1 this year, but these activities worked for other levels because you can always use more language when reacting or describing whatever it may be. And these are great to get into class mode.

Often times I pick something because it relates (well or loosely) to some words we have been going over or I simply find it hilarious and need to share it but find a way to get the high frequency words in there.

Here is what I ended up on. Since we only meet every other day (due to block scheduling), I really will only do this 10 or so times each. The thing I enjoy is I can often do some different passes of old words and/or add some enrichment vocab (for those quick kids who want more vocab) and sometimes (if appropriate) I can do some pop-up grammar.

Every day: 

• Daily report (today is) - on board
• How is everyone? - Talk in Spanish about them for 5 minutes, ask follow up questions as appropriate
• Weather report (clip off weather from espanol.weather.com) TEMPLATE

Then I also will do an additional warm up activity.

TPRS year 3 - review

Well the school year ended a week or two ago and it was my third year of using TPRS and CI.

As far as the year, I would say it was a success.  It was probably the most intense year I have ever gone through with ups and downs and the variety of activities.

I worked hard in making sure things stayed fresh while at the same time maintaining the general consistency of class.

In first quarter in my Spanish 1 classes, we did PQA about the students, their loves, their interests.  They picked up some basic conversational words and a lot of the third person forms of verbs that interested them.  Then we finished up with TPR of the body parts and some other concrete action words that we could act out.

By the time we got to second quarter, I introduced the routine of class:

Monday - Trending Tweets and Weekend chat

Tuesday - Joke and Oral Story (past tense)

Wednesday - Miáucoles and finishing Oral story

Thursday - song 

Friday - Fail and written story

We continued to prep the Spanish students' understanding of words that would appear in the first book Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.  

Then by the time we read the book, we still did a little storytelling and the usual warm up activities and by the time second quarter had ended, my Spanish 1 students felt a sense of success.  A couple of the kids weren't doing as well as the rest for various reasons, but they were still learning.  Some did hate the book.

Third quarter, we started off with a PQA activity because of a structure common to Spanish 1 students and in the next book to be read, ir + a + infinitive.  So I had the students talk about a goal they had for the new year.  We talked about those for a few weeks and I tried something new out….

I wanted to try to get some of the first and second forms into the verb paradigm.  In my first two years of TPRS, I noticed students didn't do much more than the 3rd person singular of the verbs.  This is the most easily acquired form in language, which is why children speak in 3rd person at first.  

But I still figured we should try to introduce those other forms little by little in the year.  So I had the question written on the board, "¿Qué vas a hacer?" (What are you going to do?) and then underneath I wrote "Voy a ____r" (I'm going to…) and "va a ____r" (s/he is going to __).  

Then I asked kids to own their phrase so that when I asked them, they could respond, "Voy a _____."  It was a great attempt.  Some kids didn't seem to get it as well.  Perhaps to have butcher paper on the wall for different classes so that the words stayed on the wall until the unit was over might be nice.  Maybe next year we can do that.  Otherwise, I thought it went well.  The complete conjugation of verbs is something that not even traditional Spanish students completely get the hang of.  So I figured I was doing a better job.  They had a pretty good understanding of the "n" at the end meaning "They" from second quarter.

So long story short, I think we managed to get the other forms hit during the year.  

After the PQA activity, we started storytelling and further prepping the kids to be able to read the second book Piratas del Caribe y el maps secreto.   While reading, we continued doing the other activities (storytelling, jokes, songs, etc).  

By the final test on Pirates, I was able to see that my students were learning this year and were learning to write sentences to express their understanding of the book. 

All in all, I would say the year was a success.  Many of the kids retrospectively appreciated the books because they realized how much Spanish they had learned this year.

I would say that this year has further reinforced my love for TPRS and CI teaching.  Throughout the year, I was able to converse with my Spanish 1 students daily.  I was never able to converse with my Spanish 1, 2 or 3 students as well before when we "covered" grammar and vocabulary.

I look forward to the coming years!

Día - 152 - speaking of quizzes

So it's in my nature to want to know how my students are doing!  Sue me.. wait... don't really.

In my district we have these wonderfully useful days (notice the hint of sarcasm there) where we have professional development built into the school year and we have the first Wednesday as an early out and then stay until 3:30 doing professional development.  It might be nicer if there was an actual language program I could meet with and hone our skills together.  Instead, we might have a speaker talking about different things we have to do as educators in Missouri.  Before, it was all about the state testing.  Ay ay ay

------end tangent-----

 So we have these short days and I decided that since I only have 20-25 minutes with my students on those days, I should give a quick quiz.  Yeah.  I know, right?  I should have done this years ago.  Well at least earlier on in the year.  I give little pop quizzes on the stories where the students have to use the language to answer the questions.  However, I wanted to see how well they could do on identifying the structures and using them.

I had two parts.  The top was 20 or so structures we've been using a lot this year almost in every story and matching them to their English counterpart.  These were in the past tense, like our spoken stories.  The second part was a story we'd gone over before and I blanked out some of the words with a word bank  These were in the present like our written stories.  In all, there were 32 points.

Ever since grading them, I've wanted to kick myself.  I had students score as few as 7 and some score as high as 32.  But how were some of them capable of scoring 7?  The diversity of the grading helped me realize that I had been failing them in not assessing their understanding of the structures.

It's such a "DUH" moment too.  I assumed way too much from the quizzes that I had been giving.  Somehow, I figured out that there were some students really struggling with the information.  What is most frustrating is they weren't letting me know that they didn't understand!

What does this tell me?  More quizzes over structures and much more accountability with eye contact to students.

Día 106 - love

Keep in mind I am coming from a very teacher centered frame of mind as I've plunged into TPRS.  As a result, I expect things to pan out a certain way and in the TPRS classroom, this isn't always going to happen.  It probably will depend on the comfort level of the teacher with the story and the structures.

After suffering a few days have flopped for my weekend chat activity on some different Mondays, part of me wants to scrap the activity completely.  The problem is when the students don't want to make it interesting or entertaining, they won't and class that relies on participation will be painful.  I remind them that it's as boring as we make it (as a class) and I remind them of their participation.  Nevertheless, there are still some "off day's"

I currently envision myself on a road with two potential outcomes:

1. start planning out my lessons more allowing the TPRS I've grown to enjoy to become much more mechanical

2. pick myself up after each failure, analyze where the problem occurred and figure out a solution (if possible) for the next time.  For example... if a story flops with the class, try and figure out what I was doing to make it flop.  Perhaps the class is really bad about agreeing on a name.  So I can just wait for a little bit and then tell them "It's obvious" and tell them the name. As long as I can always do this in an encouraging manner.  But there are times I like to be open to where their story is going because some clever things can come out of it.

Maybe I should write out my own little possible script for each story ahead of time so I have something to fall back on in case the energy is low.  But isn't that the moment to remind my students that they can't slack off and need to step up to their role in class?

Yesterday I think part of the reason that it went poorly was because I didn't feel like talking much and my storytelling was very mechanical.  I wasn't showing the students the love and attention they deserve.  Consequently it flopped.  I find myself remembering 1 Corinthians 13:1-3:

 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (NIV 2010)

No matter how great I might be able to make a story, if I don't express love to my students.  If I am unable to convey a sense of "I care about you as a person and how you do in this class", I will flop.  Some might learn Spanish, but many will be turned off by my attitude.  For my success of TPRS, I must always be ready to talk about the students.  That's the key.  Anything apart from that isn't as interesting to them.  I must choose to learn about them through the language instead of "just trying to get through the story."

Día 96 - failing miserably; lesson learned

So I had a former college classmate working on their internship this semester and they wanted to come in last week to observe TPRS and maybe try it out sometime.  Last week they came in and I completely messed it up.  I think he only commented that it was neat because he was trying to be nice.  I didn't have the normal energy.  My students didn't either.  I couldn't even get some of the structures to be used in the stories because I allowed too much free reign on them and didn't target them as much as I should have.

It was a complete mess.  The main problem was I hadn't been able to read my structures from Blaine's book ahead of time and look at his storyline for ideas. I often like to think about them at least the night before and more or less have a possible idea of where the story could go.  The key word is could though because in TPRS you never quite know where a story could take you.  As long as you're practicing the structures there is a lot of flexibility.

He came back this past Wednesday.  I made sure to read the story beforehand and one of the main structures was "he/she looked for"...  So I decided to do a little PQA to segway into the story.

Often times on my stories, I used to ask the students "¿Qué había?" (What was there?).  But this time... I wrote the structure on the board with the translation underneath.... "buscaba" (he/she looked/was looking for).  I then asked them who was looking for a duck in Spanish.  If they forgot the word for duck, I wrote it in Spanish and English on the board again.  Then they might have said "no one" to which I taught them the word "nadie" and wrote it on the board with translation underneath.  If no one was looking for a duck, I started practicing "buscaba" with "Who looked for a duck?"  "Did ___ look for a duck?" "Oh.. did you look for a duck?" "What did you look for?"

The idea was to get repetitions of the phrase in there while trying to start a story.  In the first class, they rebelled against the duck but we established more personal things for them to look for.  In the second class, they went with the duck storyline adding in their own details.  In the third class, they looked for the duck and it was incredibly off of the wall and the duck was looking for the fox that had kidnapped his family.  It was a tad more gruesome, but we were using 'buscaba'.

Sufficed to say, the class on Wednesday was a much better demonstration and it excited me that I discovered this new way of introducing a story of using a key structure and making my own sort of Personalized Questions with the students at the beginning to personalize it a little more.  It might turn into a story or it might just be funny and in the target language.  Either way, you're talking in the language.  The fact that we were speaking in Spanish for almost the entire class is impressive and the student teacher was blown away and excited to try.