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.

Responses to Comment - Complexity #2

I already posted a response to a question earlier here about complexity.

But in light of a conversation I have had with a few students I think this illustrates my point in questioning our understanding of complexity by traditional terms.

Example 1:
In my Spanish 1 classes, as recommended by Blaine Ray in his Look I can Talk books, we can teach the kids past and present in Spanish 1.  The more we expose them to both, the less they will rely on just the present tense.  So that's what I do. I tell oral stories in the past tense and do readings/movietalks/etc in the present tense.  When we talk about their lives, we might switch between tenses and I'll occasionally do a pop-up point about "Why did I say: querías (you wanted) instead of quieres (you want)?"

Responses to Comment - Complexity

The following is part one of a response to a comment.

Someone recently asked on a comment:

Hola Jeremy - this is really funny and I've very impressed. I teach Spanish I and I'm in awe at the complexity and level you're introducing to students. I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons (in 90 min classes and shorter periods). Just a suggestion for a future blog post. Gracias!

First and foremost, thank you for your comment!  I don't get too many. And I appreciate them because I post things to reflect but also in case it could be of any encouragement/help to other educators!

I would like to answer in different parts because your comment is loaded with different comments/questions! :-)

I hope my response helps you visualize my classes more! If you have further questions, please let me know. I enjoyed writing for the purpose of answering a comment!

Día 84 - Questionnaires

So Ben Slavic discusses using a Questionnaire at the beginning of the year for your students in one of the books I am reading.  In this way you can really cater the class to their interests.

I tried to start off the year with a class plan like he suggests.  I had the 7th grade students draw a picture of something that they liked to do and then we talked about everyone.  Throughout the week we practiced those different things and came up with some silly stories even from those phew drawings that they did.

Sadly, that's about as far as that went and then we started using materials without the personalization.  I would guess that Ben Slavic's success results from a constant personalization in which he is always adding information relevant to the students' in his stories.  The first week or two I had very few behavioral problems and we were learning all sorts of language.  It established a really good tone for the class that I didn't follow up on unfortunately.  Hopefully I can improve from my mistakes.

So now that I have the 8th graders for this semester, I plan on giving them a questionnaire today and then doing the introductory activity like last time.  Then we'll have material to talk about for the whole week and I will be able to have information to talk about them.

One teacher used the questionnaires to figure out what problem to create in a story.  It was genius.  It can be found here.

He talks about how because a student wrote that she likes to talk, he can now create a story where she has lost her voice and really needs to talk.

Since the fundamentals of a story in TPRS are a problem and different locations while practicing the established structures, I can easily see how this story could go different places.

So my goal this semester is to make sure to personalize the class a lot more for the 8th graders and to help them realize that they really are the class and the language is what we happen to learn as a byproduct.