Weekend Chat idea

I was talking to THE Bill VanPatten a lot this week about Second Language Acquisition and the possibility of working on some projects together soon.

In one of our convos, he brought up a way he had done Weekend Chat in the past. Now, the way I typically do weekend chat in levels 1 and 2 (where I normally end up teaching for whatever reason), has varied a little bit and evolved since I was doing more textbook teaching.

In level 2, I would use it to practice the preterit and have each student look through the textbook and write 3 things that they did over the weekend. I would check their conjugations and would ask them to share them with the class in Spanish. Then we would move on to something else after we finished.

Evolution of my TPRS teaching: example Alma

Someone recently asked me about how I plan out for the years. I generally do the following:

My first year with a curriculum:

• fly by the seat of my pants
• take notes on what works/doesn't (mental or written/typed out)
• survive

Subsequent years:

• hone different areas (not all at once)
• assessments
• activities 
• stories
• movietalks
• guided discussion prompts
• extras
• games
• classroom management
• usage of novels
• usage of SSR / FVR
• continue to gather more resources to throw in
• adapt resources to level of students that year (readings)
• have more fun because it's way less stressful

For example, you can tell my 2nd or 3rd year of using TPRS, I saw Cynthia Hitz had used something called a MovieTalk about Alma. I was relatively new at this. 

So my first year with Alma (maybe fall 2012), I did the following:

• Spoken story
  
• MovieTalk (talked to kids, paused movie at key points to build interest)
  
• Simple version of a reading 
• I lost this over the years

Then the next year at a new school (spring 2014), I thought it would be fun to make an Embedded Reading. So I was comfortable with the movie and added different versions.

• Spoken story
  
• MovieTalk
  
• Embedded Readings
• versions 1 & 2
• version 3