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.

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 4 - Google Voice

I'm behind the times when it comes to technology in classes.  My thoughts are that technology is no replacement for good teaching.  However, if I can find a way to use the technology to further enhance my instruction.

Something my (new) department and I are trying out this year for our snap-shots/assessments for the students is Google Voice.  I have never used this before.  This is a result of students in my previous schools not being allowed to have their cellphones.  In this case, students are able to in my new school.

So instead of speaking out in the hallway today and scrambling to figure out where they were on a scale, I had them go out into the hallway and retell some of the information from class.

This was great because it gave me the ability to see how they were doing and I can continue to listen to it.

One students recorded 9:00 worth of speaking Spanish.  He was retelling information then decided to make up new things with other words.

Another student decided not to do it at all.  He called and hung up and came back into class.  I reminded him that this was to give me an idea of where he is in my class (snap-shot) which will be recorded in the grade book and that is a 0.0 (No Evidence of Learning).  He told me he would make it up on a different day.

I'm excited about the possibilities to keep these in the students portfolios.

I also liked it because I could deal with testing issues or questions instead of being between the classroom and the hallway listening to each individual student.

What are some ways you use technology to enhance your instruction?

TPRS year 4 - assessments last year

In a previous post on my reflection over Year 3 with TPRS, Jennifer basically wanted to know what I did in terms of assessments for my kids.

I would guess this is as a result of trends in challenging our traditional grading model of percentages. 

At my new school, we will be using Standards-Based grading, which I think has the potential for being a much better snapshot of gauging where the students is at as far as our proficiency goals for the year.  We will be giving grades for their knowledge the of the subject matter instead of participation points and points for "compliance". 

I like this idea because if we can get kids to love learning just because learning is so wonderful, then that's a wonderful paradigm shift for schools.

However, it takes a lot of "buy in" from administrators, teachers, students and parents.

I'm excited about this shift in my assessment of my students and have been reading up on it through Ben Slavic's PLC blog and some other TPRS teacher blogs.

But I digress.

However, last year, I was working heavily on going through the readers.  We had a lot of daily quizzes (to check understanding of material each day because every day is important).  Really though, I can tell a student's progress because all the quizzes were in Spanish so they had to be able to understand what their peers wrote on the quiz to be able to get even half of the points.

At some point, there might not have been a language problem, but they missed a slight detail because they zoned out.  I gave enough quizzes though that this was easily noticed if they normally missed a detail, that was most likely from a slightly lower level of understanding than others.

I also constantly assess them in the TPRS part of class and the CI part of class.  Their eye contact is a big deal.  Also, their answering questions.  I would also choose to circle with students sometimes who didn't seem to be getting it, just to bring them into the attention in case I was losing them.  This was more of a formative assessment though.

In Spanish 1, I gave two pretty big assessments; one after each leveled reader.  

A friend and I wrote the tests and had multiple sections to the tests.

In the Pirates test, I even opted for a section where they saw animated powerpoint slides of things that happened in the book, and they wrote as much as they could about them in Spanish.  Those were actually awesome and I was proud of my kids.

Now. With that said, I would be more than happy to send anyone my tests and things I have created.

What I should have done though was a few speaking assessments where they tell me a story (based on a 4 frame storyline, or a retell of a story).  I should have done more timed writes.  I really should have done a lot of things to give the kids more opportunities to show me their level.

But hey, I can work on those things this next year because I will need to prove what I am doing is really awesome for the students and they absorb the language like sponges when it's taught a certain way!