TPRS Year 3 - Days 1 and 2

Well, school just got back into full swing as we returned to having students on Tuesday.  My goals this year are to worry less about the actual storytelling (because it seems to be coming more and more naturally) and to instead worry about my students.  Last year I noticed I did better at monitoring students' lack of understanding.  That seems to be more heightened this year.

The first day went very well.  I think I got the idea from Ben Slavic to teach the first day while slowly teaching the classroom expectations during the first week or two.  Most kids aren't going to listen anyway if you just give them a list of rules the first day.  I wouldn't listen if someone did that to me.  So the idea is to show that everyday we will be learning Spanish (even on the first day).  This helps me set the tone for the year.  It also is very common that teachers might think of the first day where they don't have to teach very much and they can use it as a sort of day off.  I would rather be teaching though than babysitting.  If I am babysitting the kids, there are always more personality conflicts and kids not doing what they should be doing.  I think the best way to have a "day off" (of classroom management problems) is to teach.  When kids are engaged, they cause fewer problems.

For Spanish 1 and 8th grade, they drew a picture of something that they like to do and we started talking about me and how "The teacher plays guitar" (in Spanish).  Then we circled that information a little bit.  Afterwards, I moved on to a student or two and compared and contrasted their activities to mine.  This is another idea I have gotten (and used before) from Ben Slavic.  The more I do it, the better I get at throwing out more language to the students in a comprehensible way and also doing more short grammar explanations.

For Spanish 2, I had them draw two pictures about what they did over the summer.  The idea was to review stuff from last year while throwing in some new information and getting to re-familiarize myself with them.  I did notice that I would throw in some structures from last year and check for comprehension and most of my students from last year would remember those structures.  The only difficulty is that I have students who had the previous Spanish teacher (the year before I came) and they have no clue what we're talking about.  They did grammar-based homework out of the textbook all year.  Guess how great that was for their acquisition of the language!  Yep.  Not so great.  So they are keeping me mindful of making sure I do go slow and point and review even more so the structures from last year.

All in all, they were both good days.  On day 2, we continued the activities and they'll probably take me a few weeks to finish.  If I finish early in a class with getting to know everyone, hopefully we'll have plenty of fodder from different things we talked about to create short narratives or I can do some one-word images.  I already notice myself going off on tangents and asking about the names of the chicken they play soccer with or anything else that might be relevant to make it interesting.

Día 23 - PQA

If I haven't explained PQA in depth very well, it's because I am not very good at this thing called TPRS quite yet.  If I were to have been a pro already, I would have certainly mentioned PQA.

PQA stands for Personalized Questions and Answers.

I actually bought a book by Ben Slavic called PQA in a Wink.   Since I was taking graduate classes all summer, I wasn't able to get into the reading and preparation for teaching TPRS until during the actual school year.  So I am learning while doing.

But I digress.  If you're curious about PQA and TPRS in general, you might read Ben Slavic's explanation in his blog on the Three Steps of TPRS.

At the beginning of class, when you want to teach a new story, you have your three structures that you want to use and you can use one of them in the present tense.

So today, I had the three structures from Blaine's story:
quería comer - he/she wanted to eat
sabía - he/she knew
le dijo - he/she told him/her

I started off with class asking in the present tense (because those phrases are in the past), "¿Quién quiere comer?" (Who wants to eat?) 

Well if you've taught high school before, you should know that high school students are always hungry.  So I had some students suggest some things. We talked about how they wanted to eat steak, salad, and then I asked who wanted to eat 'chocolate'.  I wanted to kind of follow Blaine's story since this is my first year.  In the story a girl wants to eat chocolate from a place but there is none.

And after the 5-10 minutes of PQA, we were able to start the story and I went into the past tense.  I could easily start off the story as in previous stories but now add the new phrase in the past tense.  It was seamless.  Students could go from the present to the past tense in their heads without any problem.

For whatever reason, I have not done this.  Instead, I usually ask for a volunteer and then start creating a story instead of seeing who will play along with me beforehand and that's how they can get into the story.  This makes more sense and you get to practice the present and the past tense of a structure during class.  Not to mention that in the rest of the story, you can refer to the other things that the other students said to compare and contrast with your main character.

It's great for establishing potential parallel story lines before you're even storytelling.

Now this is one of the ways to do PQA in class.  As Ben Slavic says in his blog entry, some teachers would rather just use PQA during the entire class because you're just talking with your students and practicing the language. 

A positive for PQA is that it can help you warm up a little as a class without jumping into asking the whole class for details too soon.