NTPRS - Day 4 - Movietalk in Russian, culture in reading, Open mic

*this is my attempt to keep track of what happened while I was at my very first NTPRS in Reno, Nevada 

I think I woke up kind of late. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was starting to drag as my lack of sleep caught up to me!

Movietalk in Russian:
I missed the first part of the Russian class and either we did the embedded reading during this day or we did it the previous day as mentioned.  I went to the part where Katya did a Movietalk in Russian and I think the best part about Katya, that I want to start paying attention to, is her intentional inflection to sound really interested in what she is saying.

That is something that so many of us, as we start out in TPRS (or get bogged down in what we have to accomplish in class), forget to be intentional with.  But when she would sound really interested in what she was saying, it just drew us more into the fantasy of the class.  She just described a video about a little puppy that got lost from his owner and eventually found him.

Something that I forgot to blog about that I really enjoyed seeing was how quickly she introduced the phrase "s/he thinks" into the class so that she could ask higher level thinking questions while we read in Russian such as "what is the character thinking here?"

TPRS year 5 - Cultural reading - los niños no acompañados

I realize that for our students, things that are novel are more interesting.  I'm also aware that one of the best experiences I had with my classes (ever) was being real with them in Spanish about a discussion where I was prepping their understanding of the words "las cosas pequeñas"(the small things) before listening to a song, "Las cosas pequeñas" by Prince Royce. (see blog entry)

While we prep our Spanish 2 students to be able to read Noches Misteriosas en Granada by the wonderfully talented Kristy Placido.  

And so a friend and I had decided to create a breakdown of new vocabulary per chapter for the novels so we would know how to pace ourselves and what/when to pre-teach structures.

This has been very helpful to determine which words we could teach through different contexts.

TPRS Year 4 - Comercial - Snickers - Dramático

It's that time of the year when I need to throw in some other activities I don't normally think about doing, and also throw in some more authentic texts where we actually can figure out some of the language to realize we have been learning this year!

Here's a fun one I used in my Spanish one classes.  It has some out of bounds vocab, so I had that translated.

Here's the handout I used: (Click here.)

Possible Extensions:
1. Notice how they pronounce Snickers in Spanish... why is it pronounced "eh-snee-kayrs"
2. Is this similar to something you've seen in English?
3. Who is this most likely being marketed to? (Do they sell Snicker's overseas?)

TPRS year 4 - The Day of the Dead

     So almost every Spanish teacher has some sort of activity or activities that they do in their Spanish classes around this time of the year!  Since November 2 is celebrated as "The Day of the Dead" in Mexico and countries in Central America, this is an opportunity to talk about something involving culture.

    Last year, I wrote a reading for them involving Day of the Dead.  I believe this was the Spanish 2 reading, but maybe a simplified version was a Spanish 1 reading, there were more out-of-bounds words than there should have been.  See reading.

    This year for Spanish 1, I found a neat video through the Moretprs yahoo group.  It's a silent movie about a girl who misses her mom and somehow gets whisked away to the land of the dead, where she finds her mother.  See movie.

TPRS year 4 - Commercial - Jimmy Dean - "Listo"

So my wife and I have a MOHO digital antenna.  Pretty neat in and of itself.  But we somehow got a Spanish channel suddenly through it in the KC area!  So we're pumped.  Well, the Spanish teacher nerd in me always thinking of authentic resources is... she likes the idea of watching television she understands. ;-)

But I noticed this commercial by Jimmy Dean...

TPRS year 4 - Spanish commercial - "Helios es vida"

I stumbled upon this commercial today and thought it was nice and simple for Spanish 1 students and could be used as a Movietalk for upper levels even and discussing your own situation or what all is going on (with more vocabulary and difficulty).

The campaign is for Helios, a brand in Spain:  http://grupohelios.com/

Basically the video is referring to "[something] es vida" ("---- is life").

In the video, they use a lot of infinitive verbs.  I'll need to slowly explain infinitive verbs (but not by calling them that) in my Spanish 1 classes.  And it would be neat to have an extension idea...

So I would probably start off the discussion after watching...
¿Qué es "vida" en tu opinión? (What is "life" in your opinion?)

And we could discuss it as a class in Spanish 1/2 and then I could ask them to write their own idea down and draw a picture to accompany it as a sort of brain-break for class.  The following class I could show them on the document camera and discuss them.  Or we could post them around the class and have the class vote on which one is the most likely.

It would be an interesting first opportunity to get them to express something more worthwhile in my class and more real (or silly if they desire) and also simple enough.

We learned the word "vida" in the phrase to get their attention, "¡Pura vida!", a common phrase used in Costa Rica for pretty much everything positive.

Then this word was further reinforced in our tweets today.

TPRS year 2 - Commercials

I took a webinar with Kristy Placido on January 19.  It was a great investment.  She provided this amazing handout with all sorts of ideas on how to make authentic texts come alive more in your classroom.

One of the things I had always thought about was incorporating commercials into class.  I had yet to do it though.  So I decided to do it because she showed us an example of one she did as well as the cloze activity.

So I found one and I went ahead and transcribed it and offered my students a cloze (fill in the blank) activity.  Then we went over more or less what it was talking about.  They did an awesome job of figuring MOST of it out.  And they loved the commercial since it was silly.  It also gave me an opportunity to talk about novelas (soap operas) in Spanish since it's a parody of one.

Here's the activity sheet.  I've had students requesting more!  So I should really do one this week sometime just to do something a little different in class.

Plus it establishes connections with the culture as well as helps us to make connections.  We might also be able to see a brand or a cultural idea in the commercials which can help us to understand the way of thinking of people in a different culture.