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.

Trying something new - La Persona Especial

So for years I have done the following to start my year in Spanish 1.
See PQA day 1 post.
See PQA after day 1 post.

In Spanish 2 a few years back I experimented with something else that was a bit of a flop.

But many have probably heard of Bryce Hedstrom's activity called, "La Persona Especial".

I've been really interested in this activity since I first heard about it. And I got to be in a private professional development session with Bryce on the plane as luck would have it where I could pick his brain about the activity. And he inspired me.

It also didn't hurt that the amazing French Teacher: Bess Hayles was going to be using the activity in her classes this year too. So if I needed to pick someone's brain about it, I will have a great resource in my own building!

But I have to admit, I am out of my comfort zone.  The idea that I thought I would try in my Spanish 1 & 2 classes is the following:

I will go over a basic set of questions about them, their name, where they are from, etc and then when I get to "what do you like to do", I will teach "likes" as well as then go into the third person form of the verb and let it segway into my previous experience with PQA. That will be the meat and potatoes of the activity, but I will also introduce new questions.

PQA, TPR and TPRS oh my!

Well, our school year started last week on Wednesday and we're currently on the day 3 rotation (due to block scheduling).

My Spanish 1 students last year felt like we didn't do enough storytelling due to PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers) with Ben Slavic's "Circling with Balls" Interview activity and then jumping almost straight into the novels.

Since storytelling is one of my favorite things, I thought that we could do the following for class this year to start off:

1. Personalized Questions & Answers (Interviews about who does what in Spanish)
2. Total Physical Response
3. Storytelling

It's a little bit intense.  The idea was the get to more stories before the Agentes Novel so that it would be easier to read.

So far, it took about 8 days to get through story 1 of Blaine's revised Look I can Talk for Spanish 1.

Obviously, I would rather go too slow than too fast and the constant exposure each day of those first structures might be a way better way to go about doing this.  Their retells were pretty good and their writings weren't too bad either!  But I am not sure if at this rate we'll really get to more stories before starting Agentes next month.

Either way, it's nice to have 3 different activities and my students' brains seem to be able to handle that.  And it helps class to go faster.

TPRS/CI year 5 - questions with partner

Something I have been trying to get to do with my students more is to practice Spanish with a partner.  I know that this is not meant to be a big part of class since Spanish 1 especially needs to hear correctly modeled input in order to acquire the language correctly.

But with that said, I wonder at times if asking the students to do a low level form of output after going over the information a lot pushes them in a good way to improve and think about how they would say it.  It's meant to be a very low stress way because it's not in front of the class.

I recently watched a Kahn academy video about how getting wrong is part of learning.  When we are wrong and we reflect on why we are wrong, it's more engaging to our brain than just being right.  It's where our brain grows more.

So how can I get my students' brains to grow more in Spanish?  I believe in Comprehensible Input!  I know the best way is loading them with Comprehensible Input.

But maybe I can occasionally guide them into noticing differences by the way I phrase questions or asking them a question really quick in English (to have them tell a partner/their hand/me/etc).

Here are some examples of things I have been practicing last year (a little bit) and this year (way more) to engage the class and give them a break to say something after all of the input:

1. How would s/he answer this question?
2. What does this question mean?
3. Why did they say [yo form of a verb] instead of the [tú form of a verb]?
4. Tell your partner how they would respond to this question, "What do you want?" (Phrase in Spanish)
5. Tell your partner how they would respond to this question, "What don't you have?" (Phrase in Spanish)
6. Tell your partner how they would respond to this question, "Why did you go to Djibouti?" (Phrase in Spanish)
7. Tell your partner how they would respond, "How are you?" / "Are you happy or are you sad?" (Phrase in Spanish)

I think it's helping push some of my kids and also giving me more opportunities to applaud my kids for figuring out Spanish and also challenging themselves and pushing themselves.  Also, I want them to hear that different form (while I point to it) and for their brain to be able to recognize it as a little different from other forms even if they can't reproduce it yet!

*Disclaimer* This is only every once in awhile and only to occasionally give the brain a break from all of the rich Comprehensible Input.  It also requires some higher level thinking since they have to understand the story details at times to know how the character would answer.  I want to use this to encourage more students to be active participants.