TPRS year 7 - writing logs

So as a TPRS teacher, I admit that I've never been that great at addressing "timed writes" over the years. I would have students do them. I only ever really had them do a timed write over retelling a class story.

Of course, last year I did add an extra element where they wrote the ending to a story about a person in Spanish 1. Then I had the students read the different endings and vote on them. It was really fun and some of the creativity had me busting up in stitches while we read them out loud. You can see those here.

I cleaned up a little of the grammar, but most of those were as written by the students!  My favorites were in 4a.  If you read the first two versions of the reading, after doing the reading, I think we then read the different endings on paper.  The idea was the trick them into reading in a different context: to find their favorite ending.

This year though, I decided that my Spanish 2 students are really all over the place in their understanding of Spanish due to many different teachers for Spanish 1 and many different experiences in addition to them all being different people.

I used to give an arbitrary number of words that was easily attainable for most to all of them in the 10 minutes. That way they would feel successful. But I would see that one student still might not achieve that for whatever reason and I would feel bad for saying the number in the first place.

Even after the first story, one student might do a 100 word rewrite while one might do a 50 word rewrite while someone else might do a 20 word rewrite. And for all of those students, that is what they can do!

So I thought this year, I could encourage students in their individual differences to improve on THEIR writing.  I want them to record the date of their timed write, the topic, the word count, and then a reflection on where they saw growth in this new writing.

I made a super simple worksheet for this that will go in their folders. I put a picture of a plant growth cycle on their to encourage them in their growth and to focus on that. This way, I can be more fair in the area of writing. If we see growth in their writing, then student with lower ability can still achieve an A or a B because they are also showing growth (in quantity) while a high flyer can easily get that A or B because they will be working on the quality of their writing (and some quantity). It's one of my ideas for differentiation.

We'll see how it goes!

If you wanted to download the template for use, take ideas from to make your own, etc here's what I came up with!

Wish me luck!

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.