Trying something new - La Persona Especial

So for years I have done the following to start my year in Spanish 1.
See PQA day 1 post.
See PQA after day 1 post.

In Spanish 2 a few years back I experimented with something else that was a bit of a flop.

But many have probably heard of Bryce Hedstrom's activity called, "La Persona Especial".

I've been really interested in this activity since I first heard about it. And I got to be in a private professional development session with Bryce on the plane as luck would have it where I could pick his brain about the activity. And he inspired me.

It also didn't hurt that the amazing French Teacher: Bess Hayles was going to be using the activity in her classes this year too. So if I needed to pick someone's brain about it, I will have a great resource in my own building!

But I have to admit, I am out of my comfort zone.  The idea that I thought I would try in my Spanish 1 & 2 classes is the following:

I will go over a basic set of questions about them, their name, where they are from, etc and then when I get to "what do you like to do", I will teach "likes" as well as then go into the third person form of the verb and let it segway into my previous experience with PQA. That will be the meat and potatoes of the activity, but I will also introduce new questions.

PQA, TPR and TPRS oh my!

Well, our school year started last week on Wednesday and we're currently on the day 3 rotation (due to block scheduling).

My Spanish 1 students last year felt like we didn't do enough storytelling due to PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers) with Ben Slavic's "Circling with Balls" Interview activity and then jumping almost straight into the novels.

Since storytelling is one of my favorite things, I thought that we could do the following for class this year to start off:

1. Personalized Questions & Answers (Interviews about who does what in Spanish)
2. Total Physical Response
3. Storytelling

It's a little bit intense.  The idea was the get to more stories before the Agentes Novel so that it would be easier to read.

So far, it took about 8 days to get through story 1 of Blaine's revised Look I can Talk for Spanish 1.

Obviously, I would rather go too slow than too fast and the constant exposure each day of those first structures might be a way better way to go about doing this.  Their retells were pretty good and their writings weren't too bad either!  But I am not sure if at this rate we'll really get to more stories before starting Agentes next month.

Either way, it's nice to have 3 different activities and my students' brains seem to be able to handle that.  And it helps class to go faster.

TPRS - year 5 - my 3 areas to improve on

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!

How to start the year with TPRS (part 1) - TPR

I never know where to direct people when they are curious about starting using TPRS in their classroom... so here's an attempt.

First few weeks:
Many TPRS teachers would recommend that you start off the year using TPR.  If you're not familiar with TPR, it's basically getting the kids to stand up and act out what you tell them.

You choose (at the most) 9 structures each day to go over with them and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.  I always choose 3 of the nine to teach in a cluster, then review the previous 3 as needed.  By the end of the class, I am using all 9.

There are some different techniques involved in TPR.

TPRS year 3 - sad

A week ago (Wow, it feels like time has flown by and yet at the same time these days seem so long!), I felt like I had a few amazing first days of class.  I was getting to know my students, my students were laughing and enjoying learning, and it was just a great start to a new year.


Then after school, a student came in and told me that some were talking about:

1. my class is boring
2. I don't know how to properly teach a foreign language

This could have been something that no one actually said. But I am inclined to believe that someone did say it because high school students are renowned for complaining about everything.

It bothered me though. Of course it would happen when I was really enjoying all of my classes. I felt like all of my classes were clicking and all had their own neat personalities that I was already excited to explore as the year went on. And I hear this.

First, this bothers me because it most likely (from what the source said) came from a student that is a heritage / native speaker of Spanish.  So of my class is boring, I realize my class isn't actually made for student that already speak Spanish at home.

But I had talked to my native / heritage students last year periodically to check their thoughts on class compared I what they saw in traditional grammar classes the year before with a different teacher. They were very positive and many told me that actually liked Spanish class more because we used the language in class and the stories were interesting.

Kids will be bored. As I tell my students: "boring people usually are bored."

That is I recognize that my class will still bore those who simply might hate school or who knows what else.

Regarding the opinion that I don't teach my foreign language class right, I will assume that this is in reference to my not teaching via the "traditional model" of lots of vocabulary and explicit grammar instruction. I did teach with explicit grammar instruction for four of my seven years teaching. It didn't ever really seem to click with the students. They would always remember the first activity of the year because I would repeat the greetings a lot and in context and have them practice. More than anything their remembering it was due to all of the repetitions.

I complained to my wife about it because it really brought me down and she responded (in Spanish): "You aren't a gold coin."*

*This statement meant (to my wife), "You'll never please everyone." Which is true.  I imagine that even a gold coin can't please everyone though! ;-)