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.

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 3 - Sound effects

Ok, I always loved the show Whose Line is it Anyway.  It's improv.  I remember really liking it even when I was a kid and it was the British version.

So I've recently stumbled upon some episodes of the American version on Youtube and I have to say it's so similar to what we do at times.  We are living in the moment with our students and creating together with them.  We probably are like Whose Line is it Anyway? but on steroids.  We have to take more audience suggestions way more often and actually interact with the audience during the entire show (class).

But I was watching this episode and the game was where two audience members have to do sound effects for different characters.  It occurred to me that it would be kind of fun to have someone do the sound effects for the day for our story about the telephone (see story skeleton).

So I asked the the person to write the quiz, for the person to keep track of my structures, and for a person to do the sound effects!  The sound effects was the new part.

In every class, someone volunteered and I told them that they would be in charge of all of the sound in class that day, including speech and anything else we needed.  They were ultimately in charge of how something sounded, although we described it enough in Spanish so they understood what was going on.

Since the story was about a telephone ringing and various people/animals calling this random telephone and someone not understanding, it worked out perfectly because the sound engineer had complete control over accents and they would sync their mouth up with the actors.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.  So if you find yourself needing something to liven up your TPRS classroom, try out getting a sound engineer for the class that day. :-)