TPRS year 2 - Reflection

I thought I would offer a bit of a reflection on this past year at school.  So I just finished my second year of TPRS with Spanish in High School (and a middle school class).  I really did notice more students speaking Spanish in these past two years in the hallways than before.  This was my first year at a new school and the teachers would often tell me that they would hear the non-Native speaking kids speaking more Spanish in their classes than previous years.

That's encouraging.  The more circling I do, the more it will just slip out in a contextualized way, right? That is, naturally.

Some things this year that were harder though were that the school environment was a bit different from my previous school.  There seemed to in general be more apathy to learning.  And I was the new guy too.  So that might not have helped.  By my fifth year in my previous school, my students generally knew who I was and what I was about.  Hopefully this second year will be easier in the new school.

I thought I would break down some of the lessons I have learned this year into sections.

1. Native / Heritage Speakers
    I was nervous about having kids in my classes who spoke Spanish as a first language at home.  I was nervous mainly because I thought that these kids might call me out on my not knowing their language or they would get bored and cause problems in class.  I found very few cases of either thing.  I combatted the first one by always asking how they would say something at home (if I was unsure or simply wanting to see if they would help me) and I would remind them, "Hey guys. I'm not as blessed with the language as you guys.  If you notice I make a mistake, please let me know! I don't want to teach something incorrectly."  I think this helped the kids see that I considered them as allies.
   The second concern wasn't really an issue because through storytelling, the Native / Heritage speaking students were sometimes even more entertained than the non-natives.  They enjoyed being silly in the language.
   I did have some opt to read every day and write summaries.  My school was considering doing a Native / Heritage Speaker Spanish class in the future.  It could be neat.  I fear it might require lots of planning though.


2. Student success and less than success
   I had a few students this year who didn't do well with the storytelling.  I asked around about one and he was a senior who didn't want to take my class to begin with.  He also never looked at the board.  He did come in after school once or twice to work with me.  To be fair, in the class that he was in, I had to teach with [outdated] technology.  So I was stuck near the front of the classroom at a computer with a touch panel monitor to switch to different places.  And in order for the other kids to see me pointing in the other school, I had to stand next to the laptop and couldn't stand in front of the TV and point.  As a result, he had a hard time in class but said outside of class that it was a lot easier.

  I also had a student or two sleep during class.  I REALLY need to get into the habit of calling home and checking up on the students.

  Also my policy on cheating next year will be that students will have to come in after school and do the same or a similar assignment to make up their zero.  I seemed to have problems with a few not doing the readings (or even trying) when I had subs.  They would even write the same short answers as someone else (word for word with the same spelling mistakes).


3. Homework
I didn't do it all year and I didn't regret that decision.  My students once in awhile thanked me.  I also heard comments from students that I was a "tough" teacher because I really did my best to make them learn in class, but they knew I did it for their benefit and they liked that.  They also appreciated how we didn't have homework because some classes really load it on.  I watched Alfie Kohn's talk about the second shift.  It's the idea that we give kids a "second job" by giving them all the homework that they must do when it's time to explore other avenues and simply be kids.

My idea for this last year was actually to give kids 3-4 assignments per 3 week period and give them options (enrichment type activities).  Some were cultural while others were retelling the story, making flashcards of the structures, etc.  I never ended up using them though and don't feel to bad about it.  My kids still learned quite a bit!  I'm not sure if they really would have learned more if I would have assigned homework.  It would just have been something that they would have rushed through and done superficially (for the most part).


4. Decorations
I feel like my room was too unorganized in the decorations.  I would like to add a word wall of some sort with verb conjugations and some high frequency vocabulary that I can go and point to when necessary.  I would like to group some of the items together like my pictures of places.  Then I could have the term, "los lugares" (places) above them.

I would also like to do something involving a wall of awesome where I just have things to praise the students and classes for.  Or another idea might be kind of like what my lab in physics class did.  We had the name of the groups who did the best in the lab activities get up on the wall and other classes could even see who the winning group was.  I thought that was a really neat way to get us to buy into physics class a lot more.   So maybe we could have something like that and I could think of a system for groups to get points and they could decorate a little placard that I could hang up on the wall.  Then we would periodically change groups.


5. Storytelling
My first year was a little easier in storytelling.  This year I started out much more confident, but burned out much sooner.  It might have had something to do with my having to miss about two weeks in January / February due to my daughter being born and also getting a bad case of strep for a week.  I'm sure it didn't help since when I was finally back, my students had missed out on the structure for a few weeks.

I did notice about halfway through the year, my kids were getting bored with the monotony of the Blaine Ray stories in Look I can Talk!  This is meant as no disrespect to Mr. Ray and his storytelling abilities.  But many of the stories seem to be the same story, only with a few new words and/or a different character.  My kids were craving novelty.  It might have been my fault for trying to work into a story that fit the structures like the Blaine stories.  For whatever reason, I found myself experimenting and looking for structures that I could make up my own stories with and found success.

I'll do a later post on this, but next year I have decided to not use the Blaine stories as much as make up my own and conspire with a fellow TPRS Spanish teacher that lives nearby.

All in all, the second year for TPRS was tougher, but there were a lot of lessons I hope to learn from to continue to make a myself better educator.

Día 101 - decorations

So I always love decorating my classroom.  It's funny.  I'm really not a very good interior decorator.  But the Spanish classroom can be a place where bright and tacky is acceptable because the idea is to bombard the students with language.

I have purchased some different decorations (moreso my first year).  In general though, I try to make them these days because I don't really like the decorations that are mass produced.  They don't really mean much to me.  But I have the typical days of the week, months, colors, emotions and a few posters from teachersdiscovery.com

I also have some different things I have acquired through traveling or that people have given to me from different countries.  I like those because they're more authentic.


My goal has always been to give them something purposeful to zone out on.

Interrogatives:
I made some of the question words with bright colors as posters a few years back without realizing how easily I can incorporate them into TPRS.  It's kind of funny how that just worked out.

Numbers
I also have a number wall where I have in brightly colored paper the numbers from 0-1000 (skipping 10s and 100s).  This way students can just use the number they want to and we can learn them that way.  It's nice.

Prepositions:
After reading someone else's blog (I think), I also decided to have a list on the wall of common prepositions in Spanish with their English translation.  It's on boring yellow paper but I tried to make it a little more colorful with different colors for the words.  It has been incredibly useful for circling in stories and I can give a brain break to the students by walking over to the poster slowly and build a little more interest while I go point to a word on their.

Places:
Last year at school we had this nice colored laser printer.  I printed out a bunch of different pictures of places for a unit in Spanish one to learn some different places (movie theater, pool, restaurant, etc).  I laminated them and labeled them underneath this year and placed them all over the room to have a way to bring that vocabulary into the stories whenever possible.

'Can I' QuestionsThese are just for the kids to have in general to leave the classroom.  I pretend like I don't understand them if they try to leave without asking in Spanish.  Of course... Can I... go to the bathroom/nurse/office/locker... etc.

Papel Picado
In previous years, I had students make 'papel picado' for Day of the Dead.  I loved hanging them up at the top of the classroom because it brightened the classroom so much to have them in there.  But this year I kind of forgot about Day of the Dead while being so pumped about this new teaching method.  It's always good to have student work posted.  I need to make more little decoration projects for my kids... even a little praise wall where I post exemplary work from different students.

Personal Pronouns
So I was really excited last year about this poster that I made.  It it's pretty straightforward.  I decided to design the personal pronouns in Spanish (you know... like "I" "you" etc).  But I illustrated it so that it could be a graphical representation for the visually stimulated.  If you'd be interested in seeing it, I have the original copy and I think I have the divided up version so you can print the different parts of it and tape them together like I had to.  Then I laminated it. 

I probably shouldn't just leave a link because the images are provided by pixton.com.


The Thinker
I'm probably the most excited about my most recent addition to the classroom....

I noticed that it was hard to incorporate the phrase "creo que" a lot into class but I thought it was useful and fun.  So I found a cartoony picture of the 'thinker' statue and colored it.  I then made a thought bubble and wrote in big letters "Creo que..." (I think...).  I laminated it and hung it up on my wall.  Now I can hang up a different ending each week to what he's thinking about.  It's a great opportunity to incorporate vocabulary and students are able to try and guess the meaning.  So far he's thought his pants were in the microwave and this week he thinks the leprechauns stole his underwear.  But I'm excited about the opportunities to change it each week for my kids to figure out on their own.

Lastly, I made a little poster for myself with a quote that is to remind me to be more positive... I got it out of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People

I shall pass this way but once, any good therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now.  Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Día 26 - In need of some decorations

I decided that something that is lacking in my room for good ideas and suggestions is my having the room covered with different sections of things.  Currently when we tell stories, I would like to focus on some different vocabulary to add into the stories.  If a person went somewhere, how did they go?

One such list of words I would like to have is a list of types of transportation.  But lists bore me (and most people).  So instead of lists, I would like to have a section on my wall dedicated to types of transportation and have them colored and labeled in Spanish.

I would also like to do this with different types of animals.

Eventually, I think it would be awesome to come up with a list of interesting adverbs and/or actions and have my students take pictures of those things so that I can post them across the classroom as well!

My room will always be a work in progress.  But I want my students to be able to see the words already on the wall so I don't have to keep writing over and over on the board animals and other things.