Responses to Comment - Pacing and Lessons

The following is part two of a response to a comment.

Someone recently asked on a comment:

Hola Jeremy - this is really funny and I've very impressed. I teach Spanish I and I'm in awe at the complexity and level you're introducing to students. I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons (in 90 min classes and shorter periods). Just a suggestion for a future blog post. Gracias!

Part #2: " I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons"

So what I worked on doing (as you can probably see in my blog) is that I worked at Backwards planning through TPRS novels last year and the previous years to help my kids be successful.  The idea was to load the kids up with Comprehensible Input (via PQA, TPRS, etc) all semester so when they got to the novels, they could read most of it with ease.

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. :-)