How to start the year with TPRS (part 2) - PQA - day 1

*I meant to post this a long time ago. It is part two of this post*

So if you saw my part one post with TPR, then you should have an idea of what TPRS originally suggested teachers do to get the students familiar with action verbs and commands that could later be worked seamlessly into stories and help students to express themselves a little bit more in the storytelling phase.

Something I had the opportunity to play around with in my 8th grade exploratory classes the past two years was the idea of PQA.

PQA stands for Personalized Questions and Answers.  If you get a chance, I think Ben Slavic explains this the best in his blog or in any of his books!

This is how I do it:

The first day of class, I have my students draw a picture of what they like to do and then write their name in the top corner. They can write what it is in English underneath if they think I won't know what it is.

After I get attendance figured out, I start walking around and looking around.  I am developing ideas of where I can go that day in Spanish.  If I have two basketball players, I could talk about them on the same day and compare and contrast them.  Or I could talk about one on one day and the other on a different day to review the structures: "s/he plays" and "basketball".

Once I'm ready to start, I go over to the board and I write (Spanish in black and English in blue):
    el profesor toca la guitarra.
      the teacher plays the guitar.

Then I say this slowly while pointing to each word.  I move my arms down from above my head to down to my sides (this is my signal for new information).

Once my students look at me like I am crazy I tell them in English:
Me: Oh, right.  This is your first day.  Whenever I say something like this new in Spanish, you are going to pretend like it's the most interesting thing in your whole life.  To do that you'll say, "Ooooooh."
Let's try that again.  El profesor toca la guitarra.  
Class: OOOOOOH.


Then I keep talking about myself by circling the information until students get it easily and we can add more information.  Usually at that point I start talking about another student.  Maybe another student plays an instrument.  Maybe they play a sport.  I will write on the board what they do in black and the English translation underneath in blue/green.

Then I compare/contrast myself with someone else. The first day I stick to a lot of yes/no questions and occasionally a who/what question.

The first day or two I don't do a whole lot with multiple verb forms. As I go with the PQA, I might slowly let it trickle in that if a person wants to say "I [..]", that the action will end in an "o" instead.

It has only gotten better and sweeter each year. I have found more ways to get the kids exposed to the "you" and "i" forms. I should still try to add in the "they" forms a little when more than one does something. But it's really about the kids and not about the grammar, or else it wouldn't be successful.  Sometimes though, it can be hard when the kids almost have to be trained to be interested in each other's lives.

Pictees and Retells

So this year I am trying to improve on my storytelling skills by encouraging more spoken retells to a partner and also writing retells (timed write 10 minutes).  I know that a lot of input precedes output. But unfortunately, my department still wants our kids to "speak" and "write" Spanish.  So I need to get the kids ready for other classes. And this is a pretty great way to build their confidence (hopefully).

Había una chica. La chica estaba en New York.
Tenía un perro feo. Quería un elefate pequeño...

The last retell we did over our first story went fairly well.  Some of the retells kids can do blow my mind.  Others leave a lot to be desired.  I find it fascinating how two kids in the same class can absorb at such staggeringly different rates!

Today I wanted to give my students a bit of reinforcement after working for a few days on our story.

I passed out a half sheet of paper with 6 squares.  Then, I pre-wrote out descriptions from their story in chunks (thanks to their class scribe!).  I heard this called a Pictee (Pictation) instead of Dictee (Dictation) somewhere.

TPRS year 5 - Agentes Assessment

So I was looking at one of the assessments for the Spanish 1 book Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.  Let me be clear in that I felt quite rushed in the book this semester with block scheduling.  And I personally got tired of having an entire quarter revolve around the book and not have as much fun with storytelling.  But I think I know what to do to improve that next semester when we do the Piratas book.

The way that we assessed was in four areas: Reading, Writing, Listening, & Speaking*

TPRS year 2 - Kindergarten day (revisited)

I wrote an entry here about my first attempts at Kindergarten Day (or what I thought it was) last school year.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So last year I probably misunderstood what exactly “Kindergarten day” is.  I thought having a children’s book up on the board and having the kids translate the pages was what I was supposed to do.  I discovered through reading about other TPRS teachers’ experiences, I instead discovered that the purpose of Kindergarten Day is to read to the kids in ONLY Spanish and allow them to soak in the language (no translation). 

A few weeks ago I tried this out on a Friday after a reading we had.  I tend to rush through the readings a little bit because it’s not my strongest point as a TPRS teacher and I can tell since I am not as passionate about them, my students aren’t as passionate either.  I prefer speaking the language (Tangent: On the other hand, a teacher that just started using TPRS this year LOVES the readings and feels less confident on his spoken TPRS and the students love doing the readings in his class).  But we can simulate a little bit of the Kindergarten experience through finding a children’s book and reading it to them in comprehensible language.  It could be a book in English that we describe in Spanish or it could be a book in Spanish that we read when level appropriate. 

Long story short, it went great a few weeks ago and my kids really liked acting like Kindergarten students.  A few were asking me when I would read to them again and I decided this week.  I chose: El Oso Verde de Alan Rogers.  (“The Green Bear” by Alan Rogers).  It’s great in that it’s very colorful and you can describe what’s in the pictures as well as it not being too complicated to follow. 

Here were the ground rules:

My job(s)

• I will read in Spanish to you and point in the book
• I might also ask related questions while reading the book
• I will stay in Spanish the entire time

Their job(s)

• bring in cookies, juice, milk, a blankey, a stuffed animal, etc (optional)
• give me their eye contact
• pretend like they are children (sitting/laying on floor)
• answer questions in Spanish (no English)
• enjoy listening to the story and to the language

      Today my classes were REALLY excited about it.  As soon as they walked in they were ready.  I had to explain that we had another activity beforehand but I wanted to give them 20-25 minutes of Kindergarten so if they would just let me know when it was time by saying, “¡Ya no puedo más!” (I can’t do it anymore!) – a structure we had used in a previous story.

A few students probably behaved in my class much like they behaved for their kindergarten teacher and were fidgety and didn’t appear to be paying attention.  But for the most part, they did a great job.  I joked with them (since it was a half day today) that they had done such a good job in class that I was giving them the second half of the day off.

Successes:

·     I think this activity works because high school students are nostalgic for their elementary school days

·     Students seemed to enjoy the activity

Needs improvement:

• My push over nature allowed some kids to go to the cafeteria at the beginning of class to get milk.  I told them next time to come prepared.  Maybe I should have let them learn their lesson this time by not letting them go so they knew the consequence was real first
• Some students didn’t really play the game
• One student commented that the book had no plot (afterwards). Someone else responded: "Hey, we were in kindergarten.  It doesn’t matter."  So maybe I can also choose some more engaging books every once in awhile.