TPRS Year 3 - Story - telephone

So I was trying to find something to help go over some structures involving, "couldn't" or "can't" in Spanish and I came across this story script from Jim Tripp that I bought from Ben Slavic's site.  I really think there are some gems in this book.

The basic idea in Jim's version was that a person called someone and that person hung up the phone.  I adapted the story from Jim Tripp's book.  But the structures I used were the following:

• Contestó el teléfono    s/he answered the phone
• No podía entender / hablar              
      s/he couldn’t understand / speak
• colgó el teléfono     s/he hung up the phone 

* I was also trying to get more repetitions of llamó (s/he called) since that was in our weekend chat yesterday.

I tried it out in both Spanish 1 & 2.  Of course in Spanish two I could focus on some different things than with Spanish 1.  And of course the language was more complex at times and we could review more words.  But the general idea was the same.

I recently had acquired a telephone as well and I thought it would be the perfect prop.

So I asked if there was a boy or a girl.  We went over all of that.  I then asked where he/she was.  Then what was he/she doing (had to translate that... since we hadn't used it too much).  Then we had each person doing something in the place and suddenly, they heard a phone.  The phone rang, they looked for it, found it, and answered it.  Someone called them.  They couldn't understand.  They hung up.  On a different day, someone else called, they couldn't understand because they couldn't speak whatever language was being spoken and they hung up.  Most classes got to two days for sure.  A few classes got to three days.

In one of my classes, a student told me, "Thanks for making class so fun today."  To which I replied, "No.  Thanks to your class.  You guys are the ones who made it interesting."

All in all a blast of a day!  My students and I sure needed it.

*Note to self* Props can really help a story.

Día 161 - story - s/he remembered

So I've been coming up with some of my own stories with structures I think might be fun.  I was thinking about a silly story that I could do with my Junior High kids.  The neat thing is how different my original idea (written story) and their story (oral story) came up.  They loved their story so much though and it was a magical class that day.  You could feel the energy and excitement.

The story involved the structures:

estaba sorprendido (he was surprised)
recordó que (he/she remembered that)
buscó (s/he looked for)

The students came up with the following story:
      There was a chameleon named Thomash.  Thomash entered his room one day and he was surprised!  He was surprised because there was a girl in the pool in his room.  Her name was Jackie.  Jackie was really sexy and she had a small bikini on.  Jackie liked to swim.  Jackie invited Thomash to swim with her.
     Oh no.  Thomas remembered that he didn't have a bathing suit.  Thomas went to "Chameleons-are-us" and looked for a bathing suit.  He looked and looked and looked.  He found one and grabbed it. It was a tight bathing suit.  He went to his room and Jackie liked the bathing suit a lot.


The written story was the following:
     There is a boy named Gregorio.  Gregorio enters his bedroom and he is surprised.  His bed isn't in his room!  He looks for his bed in his room.  It's not there.  There is a problem.  He doesn't remember where it is.
     He goes to the bathroom.  He looks for it in the bathroom.  He looks for it in the toilet.  It's not there.  He looks for it for an hour in the house.
     "Where is my bed?"  he thinks.
     He goes to his friend's house.  He enters his room and he sees his bed!  His bed is in his friend's room!  Gregorio grabs a chair and hits his friend in the head.
     "What's your problem?" his friend asks.
     "You stole my bed!" Gregory yells.
     "I didn't steal it.  Don't you remember?"  his friend asks.
     At that moment, Gregorio remembers why his friend has his bed.  On Tuesday, he lost his bed in a basketball game with his friend in the park.  

Día 158 - important structures in the language

So I teach Jr High through High School Spanish (Spanish III is the farthest but after next year I imagine we'll have Spanish IV if I stay there).

I'm really excited about what we've been able to accomplish with TPRS this year.  I'm far from perfect with the teaching style but I've seen some amazing things with more than anything my students' confidence levels in trying to communicate in the language and going for meaning versus 'grammatical correctness'.  Plus we're teaching them how to succeed more with the language by teaching it in an appropriate context.

But my Junior High Spanish classes are not required and they are only for a semester.  Still, I see that the students in Junior High are really fun to play around with and I would like to come up with a list of structures to target for the Junior High levels that I could easily use or they could bring into other storytelling in later years.  I don't want to teach them the same things.  Maybe similar things.  Sometimes I've been bringing in lessons from Blaine Ray's Look I can Talk year 1 book.  I've also taken some ideas from Amy Catania's Cuentos Fantásticos.

I find that a lot of the stories that I have acquired outside of Blaine Ray's book have to do with a lot of vocabulary and not as many structures.  For me, this makes the story much more specific than it needs to be.  I've found that it's better to have the structure focused around your action/verb because you can easily change who does that action and then in the reading use the other word you wanted them to learn like (grandmother, etc).

Maybe I'm missing the point, but it seems like the vocabulary is more easily acquired and the structures are more of what I should focus on.  I can easily throw the vocabulary in while circling

So if anyone has any ideas of structures that might be high frequency and useful to throw in for my Junior High Classes, let me know.

I'm also going to more seriously take into account the questionnaires next year and use those to really make my classes more engaging.

Día 10 - TPRS

Wow, I can definitely see how people who like to plan things would have a problem with TPRS.  The more you plan a story, the more you limit what the students can do with it.

As I've learned, since you're working with structures, you can teach those and regardless of where the story leads, the students are using the structures.  It's win-win.

Today I could not have told you where my stories would have gone!  My classes attempted to finish up the stories that we started yesterday.  The stories got very elaborate in some classes.  I love how you get to throw in high frequency description words into the stories to help make them more interesting.

Based on the same structures and similar start to the story, these are things we learned about today.


In one class, a girl wanted to have 2.4 babies.  In the same class a boy got a new gigantic television from another boy who wanted to have a dollar and he gave him a dollar.

In another class, a boy went to Six Flags dancing slowly (or slow dancing) with another student.  He later went to a Hooter's (because the students didn't think I would take that suggestion!) walking like Steve Urkel quickly.

In another class, a boy went to Taco Bell where Gerard Butler happened to have 900 green cats and he gave them to the boy!

In another class, I was most surprised when a girl who wanted 16 tall African American boys went to St. Louis because there were lots of gigantic squirrels in Sonic (where she was).  She went to St Louis kissing the air quickly.  She then later went (at the suggestion of a student) to Church's Chicken walking like a chicken slowly.

When storytelling, it is very important to know your audience.  My students are getting better at playing the game every day.  But they still need suggestions from the teacher that are outlandish or normal to build up more vocabulary.

So far, the hardest class for me to connect with has been the middle schoolers.  They don't quite seem to be as engaged as the high school students with this method and I think it is because I am not quite as in touch with their culture to grab their attention.  But I'm still learning about this method, so we'll see.

It's definitely more exciting for me as a teacher to come into class and feel the excitement from the students as they tell the stories with me.