Simple story - Plays

Someone asked on the facebook group recently about a story involving plays and sports or activities due to constraints they are in. Here were some ideas I gave:

Idea 1: (3 problems model)

Guide words:

1. wants to play (with)
2. goes to talk to
3. says, "I don't want to play that."

modify guide words as needed

Script:
[Student] wants to play something. They play it really well. They play it [embellish]. There is a problem. They don't want to play alone. They go to talk to [character]. The character isn't playing [sport]. They character is playing [sport 2].

Comprehensible Input with the MONO

Hay un mono. (from first episode)

So I have met various educators over the last year or two who have told me how much their classes have enjoyed a little story I made about a "mono" (monkey).

Backstory:
I thought it would be fun to make a super simple TPRS like story about a character that wanted something and didn't have it and so they went to the 3 locations. And as I drew one day on my iPad, suddenly I had a monkey, an island, and Antarctica. From there the first "mono" story was born!

Since then, I have had teachers who have met me at conferences (or have told me via email) how much their classes have enjoyed the story.

New storytelling adventure (Fall 2016)

I've been doing another Youtube endeavor under the title of "Cuentas Conmigo".

This is the fourth story. I just wrapped up episode 6 yesterday and I am really proud of how it is turning out.

In the previous Cuentas Conmigos, there was very little emphasis on anything cultural.  And I realize that that might be seen as a weakness to the videos. If teachers use them in their classes, perhaps it would be best to add in some more little cultural tidbits. In this way, teachers could use them as springboards for discussion or as a nice little culture pop up.

The first episode you can really see this is in episode 5 where we learn that the narwhal can't do any tricks. While he is painting a familiar painting (well mural actually) should be seen. It's something I learned a lot about thanks to Mira Canion and her wonderful TPRS reader: Agentes secretos y el mural de Picasso.

And in this week's episode, the main character finds himself going to a Spanish-speaking country, where (as it was a country I visited many years ago), I threw in some different places that he could potentially have gone to!

When dinosaurs attack - movietalk

Here's something I decided to do to help review some things for later as well as add in some additionally useful words.

And I think it's funny.

I realized since this week was a shorter week, it might be fun to spice things up with a MovieTalk and do it as a mini lesson and then build to another MovieTalk with similar structures.

So here is MovieTalk one about dinosaurs:

Bathroom story (revised)

What's a storytelling Spanish class without a good bathroom story!

I'm sure you've all heard of Señor Wooly. He's fantastic. I admit that I'm incredibly envious of his talent and creativity and wish I had an ounce of all of his amazing abilities! If you haven't heard of him, he makes silly songs in Spanish with story lines that really resonate with students.

I don't personally have an account this year for his site, but he has the song: "Puedo ir al baño" on youtube.

Every year I have a bathroom story of some sort. In conjunction with the story, our warm up involves listening to the song by Señor Wooly and accomplishing various tasks (cloze, re-order lyrics, translate phrases from song, etc).  They always listen to it at least twice when class begins while completing the task, while I do necessary teacher duties (attendance, last minute prep, etc). I enjoy starting class with music whenever possible because it generally relaxes students to ease into class.

Click here to see post from last year.

In previous years, it was more like a traditional story from TPRS classes where a person goes to different people and asks them for information. Last year's structures weren't going to cut it.

Probably due to the nature of my class, it's always a fun time and I had no real reasons to change the story except the Spanish 2 teachers expect the kids to know some more information by next year that I haven't been able to really hit yet.

I need to use "to have to [do something]" and I thought that would go great with a bathroom story based more around the song: Puedo ir al baño by Señor Wooly.  And I could actually borrow the genius idea from Señor Wooly from the story within the song.

So here's what I came up with:

Some of the structures match the song more easily and/or I can use the song itself to create an embedded reading for the present tense while we tell a relatively simple story in the past. The part that I think is nice is how relate-able it can be (for some classes) or how farcical it could be for others. Also, we tell the story once we have TPR'd the phrases.

Remember that in anything it's always good to try new things and genre is always something you can play around with.  The best part about storytelling is that there are so many types of stories we can use. It's best not to limit ourselves to "character doesn't have ___. Character is sad. Character goes to so and so, etc.".

TPR (Total Physical Response):

Here's the TPR part where I have students get up and move a little bit for a brain break:

• Necesita ir al baño (hold tummy / cross legs)
• “Tienes que esperar” (point finger down at palm for have) / (hold out hand like picture for “wait”)
• Lo / la deja ir - let butterfly go free

And I always add more to it, "necesita ir al baño y se da la vuelta y sonríe" (s/he needs to use the bathroom and turns around and smiles). "Lo deja ir lentamente y grita en silencio" (S/he lets it go slowly and yells silently).

TPRS (Storytelling):

Here's my basic story skeleton. Let me know what you think!

Friendly Disagreement

A very talented colleague and I have an ongoing friendly disagreement about the purpose of upper level Spanish classes. (I can say it's a friendly argument because I understand her goals, and don't disagree with her approach based on those. I'll explain how that's possible below).

School Background:
I teach in a school that is in a relatively Blue-collar area.  As a result, college is not a priority for all of the students, nor should many go to college due to the shifts in our workforce. There are many great vocational jobs and technical jobs that don't require a college degree and lots of debt!  And we are doing our kids a disservice by pushing college onto them when they don't necessarily need it to be a productive member of society.

My colleague's thought is that we can de-emphasize grammar in the lower levels (since it's a requirement for most kids).  But for those that really want to excel in the language, they will learn Spanish grammar in levels 3 and 4.

The belief is that if our kids from Spanish 3 go to college Spanish, they won't have an understanding of the grammar to be able to succeed in the college Spanish classes. So we need to teach them explicit grammar.

I respectfully disagree with this viewpoint for a few reasons:

Responses to Comment - Complexity #2

I already posted a response to a question earlier here about complexity.

But in light of a conversation I have had with a few students I think this illustrates my point in questioning our understanding of complexity by traditional terms.

Example 1:
In my Spanish 1 classes, as recommended by Blaine Ray in his Look I can Talk books, we can teach the kids past and present in Spanish 1.  The more we expose them to both, the less they will rely on just the present tense.  So that's what I do. I tell oral stories in the past tense and do readings/movietalks/etc in the present tense.  When we talk about their lives, we might switch between tenses and I'll occasionally do a pop-up point about "Why did I say: querías (you wanted) instead of quieres (you want)?"

Responses to Comment - Complexity

The following is part one 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!

First and foremost, thank you for your comment!  I don't get too many. And I appreciate them because I post things to reflect but also in case it could be of any encouragement/help to other educators!

I would like to answer in different parts because your comment is loaded with different comments/questions! :-)

I hope my response helps you visualize my classes more! If you have further questions, please let me know. I enjoyed writing for the purpose of answering a comment!

New storytelling experiment - first and second person

So I am doing a side project this semester with anyone willing to join in.  I decided to do another storytelling experiment this semester in the past tense and also do the same story in the present tense (depending on school climate where the video is being watched).*

In my first story, it was mostly narrating in the past tense. There wasn't a lot of first/second person forms of the verbs (past or present).

In my second story, I tried to have the turtle say more, but you didn't hear him talking about it as much as I would just have the bubble with the first person form.

This time around, I wanted to really expose learners to language in context and thought the best way to get the characters to talk about themselves is similar to in the classroom itself! Interview them. So I will periodically be interviewing the actors in the story to ensure we have the correct information (and also that their voice is being heard).

Check out my attempt at this in episode 2!

Present tense - episode 2

Past tense - episode 2

*Even some teachers who like to use stories and CI find themselves locked into a textbook that predominately goes over the present tense in level 1.

Story idea - the monster

So if you read my last post, you can see my dilemma. I now have to start coming up with my own story scripts and picking and choosing again via books and blogs of other TPRS practitioners.

And I was wracking my brain yesterday until right before bed, I finally had a story epiphany.

Element 1:
I needed to practice sale de (leaves), compra (buys), and the other usual ones (wants, has, sees, says, gives, etc).

Element 2:
In addition, going over family members (aside from dad, mom, brother, sister) is not my strong suit. Which got me thinking about this story script from Amy Bachman Catania with a grandmother yelling after finding a monster and leaving the house and grabbing a cactus.

I loved the idea of introducing grandmother because I wanted to use the word grandfather soon in a quick movietalk about dinosaurs coming to a house and hitting Santa Claus and an grandfather (old man) hits them and runs them off. (See video on Youtube.)

Element 3:
Oh, and not to mention I need to hit, "le gusta" (likes), "vive" (lives) and "se llama" (he/she calls himself/herself) to be closer on target at this point in the year.


Storytelling:
So as this is all coming together, I came up with the following:

TPR structures:

• abre la puerta - s/he opens the door
       (open a door)
• (this is a review of a similar phrase we learned in se hace de noche)
• la abuela - the grandmother
       (grab walker and smile)
• se llama - he/she calls himself/herself
       (make name tag on chest)
• this is also a review that I taught a little bit earlier on but I would like to practice "what's your name" and "my name is" more with actors.
• vive - s/he lives
       (my 1st class decided the gesture should be a zombie/monster walking because "IT'S ALIVE")
• le gusta - s/he likes
       (thumbs up)

See PowerPoint here.

Choose the story ending (Writing and Reading Idea)

If you've been doing storytelling, you've probably already thought of this activity before. I came up with it because for the life of me, I couldn't finish the last story and it was losing steam, and I wanted to do a timed write, but in a new way.

What I wanted was a conscious extra pass over the structures from our story. So I did an embedded reading of their story so far.

Here are the structures we were working on in their story.

Pictees and Retells

So this year I am trying to improve on my storytelling skills by encouraging more spoken retells to a partner and also writing retells (timed write 10 minutes).  I know that a lot of input precedes output. But unfortunately, my department still wants our kids to "speak" and "write" Spanish.  So I need to get the kids ready for other classes. And this is a pretty great way to build their confidence (hopefully).

Había una chica. La chica estaba en New York.
Tenía un perro feo. Quería un elefate pequeño...

The last retell we did over our first story went fairly well.  Some of the retells kids can do blow my mind.  Others leave a lot to be desired.  I find it fascinating how two kids in the same class can absorb at such staggeringly different rates!

Today I wanted to give my students a bit of reinforcement after working for a few days on our story.

I passed out a half sheet of paper with 6 squares.  Then, I pre-wrote out descriptions from their story in chunks (thanks to their class scribe!).  I heard this called a Pictee (Pictation) instead of Dictee (Dictation) somewhere.

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.

Spanish 1 or 2 story idea - I have an app for that!

I am preparing my Spanish 2 students for a Movietalk based on this commercial because it's so silly and I don't feel as though my students are confident with "le da" or "le dio" or other forms of that verb yet.

TPRS year 4 - Story - la mafia de las vacas

So I have to share this, it went well with a few classes who appreciate my goofiness.  I wrote this story lastnight. Maybe I haven't slept as much this week.  I didn't realize there were meme's with the cow mafia until looking for one after the fact for this post!

(See possible pics for classes:
The Cow Mafia   &    Al Cowpone)

So I can use these pics next time!

Here's what I did in Spanish 1 this week.  I like the idea of starting out with past at the first few places and then transitioning into present in the last place.  Haven't quite gotten to it yet, but that's why my story was written that way.

Web Series - Check out first story!

I finished the first entire story based around a monkey wanting bananas.

The story is in the present tense and will slowly build on previous structures.  I will make more stories about the monkey and other characters as I go and each video will get increasingly more difficult.

After each story, there will be a quiz!

There are subtitles in English to offer 100% transparency or for those who want to check what it means.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPD6O-TouCqQXu4LDPOnzAUGDh7r3G7TV&feature=mh_lolz

Let me know what you think!

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 4 - Spanish 1 simple story

With the 90 minute block schedule, my students and I have been doing some PQA and some TPR in the same days.  This has really been kind of neat because it's almost like two different classes.  Sure they're worn out by the end of it.  But I told them at the beginning of the year that my class would be more like Spanish boot camp and if they didn't like that idea, they could transfer out of my class.

So I found this silly video clip and I was going to try it out next week with them to introduce a simple story to them to break up the monotony of PQA and show them that they have been learning for a purpose!

TPRS Year 3 - Story/Song combo - Me cortaron mal el pelo

So many moons ago I stumbled across a song that was really catchy to me in a silly way.  It's from this show 31 minutos in Chile, which is kind of like a Sesame Street type show, although I'm not as sure about the educational value of it.  After reading up on it, it seems more like some of the cartoons, like Pinky and the Brain, that were as popular with adults as they were with children.

But I digress.  So I found this song called, Me cortaron mal el pelo (they cut my hair poorly).  I wasn't ever really sure what to do with  the song until recently.

You see I've been storytelling the past few years, and it has occurred to me that ANYTHING can help us come up with our structures for storytelling in class.  I needed to talk about some of the things so my students could better understand the Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto (Pirates of the Caribbean and the secret map) novel we started.

And the song is fairly simple and lends itself wonderfully to creating a story with some structures I needed to get some more reps of anyways.  Feel free to adapt it as needed for your classrooms and let me know if you come up with other ideas for it or if you end up using it.

Here were my structures (since I used the phone story last week and they went well together):

• ya no podía ir a la escuela
       s/he couldn't go to school any longer
• "Puedo cortar tu pelo"
      "I can cut your hair"
• le cortó mal el pelo
    s/he cut his/her hair poorly

TPRS Year 3 - Story Idea - Hair in the nose

So I have been inspired some other teachers who have been using videos to do a Movie-talk in class.  This is the idea of describing what's going on in a scene with your kids.

Having not ever seen someone do this, I decided to try it today.  To give a little bit of history though, I had planned this out for this week.

So Tuesday (spoken storytelling day) I told in my Spanish two classes a story using the following structures:

• Se miraba en el espejo (he looked at himself in the mirror)
• De repente un grano salió de su nariz. (suddenly a zit came out of his nose)
• Lo trató de sacar pero no pudo (he tried to pull it out but he couldn't)

We acted it out and it was entertaining.  In one class a rat came out of the bellybutton and a cow came out of  the mouth of the girl on a date.  We used my puppets for that.  Then in another class a pink beard had a pink zit come out which he later realized wasn't a problem when he remembered he was pink.

So today, we first tried the MovieTalk with the video: Blind Date.  It's my favorite kind of animated movie: short, silly and it has no no spoken language in it.  This way, we can hear the music and talk about the movie and pause as needed and the kids can comprehend what we're talking about.  After watching/talking about the movie for 10 minutes or so, I had a reading that I had tried to write around their level (plus a few words that they didn't know but we could be exposed to over the course of the rest of the year).  I admit it's not the most advanced story, but please keep in mind I want my kids to acquire the language slowly over time instead of "teaching them" way too much that they'll never possibly remember.

The second hour class is a hard sell.  They are quieter and slightly over half Spanish-speaking.  So the Spanish speaking kids are patient with the kids who are learning, but when it comes to reading, only one person ever really translates.  This is frustrating because I know how important the reading is.  It's like the idea, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink."  But I so want to make him drink.  I want my kids to always enjoy the readings.  Especially when I work on them!  

The third hour class seemed to go better.  There are only four students but there was more eye-contact with the reading.  

I pulled a girl aside from 2nd hour and asked if there was something I could do or if my reading was horrible.  She said she enjoyed it, but the other girl monopolizes the translation and she wasn't able to get anything out so she stopped.  I asked her if maybe I tried to create groups where only a group could answer however many questions before I changed groups.  She said that might help her.  Food for thought.  

Oh and here's the movie clip:

I made an extended embedded reading in the yo form that was loosely based off of a different Youtube video but went along nicely with these structures above.  My students in the morning did an awesome job on it.  It's a lengthy read as well, but I want to build their confidence with the reading.  I thought it turned out well.  Here's the link.