Wow, I can't believe I am in year 5 of teaching with TPRS and CI. I am probably going more towards CI while bringing in TPRS, since CI gives me the option to find more extensions than just stories.
I'm pretty excited about this year so far. It's my second year in a big high school with a Spanish department. We're slowly shifting towards a more TPRS/CI friendly curriculum, which is exciting. We were all quite excited about our Spanish 1 students last year and their abilities in the language compared to previous years with more traditional curriculum.
This year I am trying to improve in a few areas. I've been gleaning ideas from other teachers.
The three main focal points for my teaching this year are:
1. Policing eye-contact better (while going slowly)
2. Contacting parents more frequently (with good and bad reports as needed)
3. having notebooks for my writers to write in from the beginning of the year with the PQA activity
There are more things I am tweaking this year, but those are the three big ones I am working on, on a daily basis.
I hope to be more effective and inspire more students in their acquisition of the language than last year. I noticed that since I didn't police eye-contact very well, I lost some students in a way that they were unable to recover in class last year.
Wish me luck!
Showing posts with label improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label improvement. Show all posts
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Día 111 - in need of something
So this has been a very curious year with TPRS so far.
As I started out in the beginning, we tried to talk about all sorts of different things with the structures. I've found that there are times when it's very hard to create a spin-off story that interests the class from Blaine's Readings. I think it's because I am thinking in the box and constraining the story to things we've already done.
It's funny that at the beginning of the year, colors and size made it silly and funny. Now, my students don't seem to be as impressed with using colors in the stories. It makes sense that we would need to add progressively harder details and more vocabulary, but sometimes I find myself at a loss.
I was reading a lot of Ben Slavic's book PQA in a Wink over the weekend and something that I noticed, he came up with a story about a girl wearing chains and black pants just to add something odd to the story and she ended up becoming a firefighter and saving some boy in class. Obviously, you only can script maybe the point of departure, but that might still be helpful for me to think in terms of introducing the story to the new structure pretty quickly in there.
This makes sense because I need to get to the new structure as quickly as possible to circle it and we can add the easy details in as we go. Often times we don't need to circle the structures on the easy details. It's funny how I used to have to circle: tenía (he/she had), quería tener (he/she wanted to have), or even se llamaba (his/her name was) and now we can fairly effortlessly throw those structures into the story.
So, in conclusion, I need to work on the following things:
1. getting at least the first new structure as close to the beginning of the spoken story as possible to circle it and let details fall into it there
2. start helping encourage new types of information aside from color or size. We can talk about clothes, body parts, food, or whatever we NEED in Spanish. But I should work on incorporating one or all of those in the future stories even if it's in circling to help introduce words to start learning.
As I started out in the beginning, we tried to talk about all sorts of different things with the structures. I've found that there are times when it's very hard to create a spin-off story that interests the class from Blaine's Readings. I think it's because I am thinking in the box and constraining the story to things we've already done.
It's funny that at the beginning of the year, colors and size made it silly and funny. Now, my students don't seem to be as impressed with using colors in the stories. It makes sense that we would need to add progressively harder details and more vocabulary, but sometimes I find myself at a loss.
I was reading a lot of Ben Slavic's book PQA in a Wink over the weekend and something that I noticed, he came up with a story about a girl wearing chains and black pants just to add something odd to the story and she ended up becoming a firefighter and saving some boy in class. Obviously, you only can script maybe the point of departure, but that might still be helpful for me to think in terms of introducing the story to the new structure pretty quickly in there.
This makes sense because I need to get to the new structure as quickly as possible to circle it and we can add the easy details in as we go. Often times we don't need to circle the structures on the easy details. It's funny how I used to have to circle: tenía (he/she had), quería tener (he/she wanted to have), or even se llamaba (his/her name was) and now we can fairly effortlessly throw those structures into the story.
So, in conclusion, I need to work on the following things:
1. getting at least the first new structure as close to the beginning of the spoken story as possible to circle it and let details fall into it there
2. start helping encourage new types of information aside from color or size. We can talk about clothes, body parts, food, or whatever we NEED in Spanish. But I should work on incorporating one or all of those in the future stories even if it's in circling to help introduce words to start learning.
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