Story idea - the monster

So if you read my last post, you can see my dilemma. I now have to start coming up with my own story scripts and picking and choosing again via books and blogs of other TPRS practitioners.

And I was wracking my brain yesterday until right before bed, I finally had a story epiphany.

Element 1:
I needed to practice sale de (leaves), compra (buys), and the other usual ones (wants, has, sees, says, gives, etc).

Element 2:
In addition, going over family members (aside from dad, mom, brother, sister) is not my strong suit. Which got me thinking about this story script from Amy Bachman Catania with a grandmother yelling after finding a monster and leaving the house and grabbing a cactus.

I loved the idea of introducing grandmother because I wanted to use the word grandfather soon in a quick movietalk about dinosaurs coming to a house and hitting Santa Claus and an grandfather (old man) hits them and runs them off. (See video on Youtube.)

Element 3:
Oh, and not to mention I need to hit, "le gusta" (likes), "vive" (lives) and "se llama" (he/she calls himself/herself) to be closer on target at this point in the year.


Storytelling:
So as this is all coming together, I came up with the following:

TPR structures:

• abre la puerta - s/he opens the door
       (open a door)
• (this is a review of a similar phrase we learned in se hace de noche)
• la abuela - the grandmother
       (grab walker and smile)
• se llama - he/she calls himself/herself
       (make name tag on chest)
• this is also a review that I taught a little bit earlier on but I would like to practice "what's your name" and "my name is" more with actors.
• vive - s/he lives
       (my 1st class decided the gesture should be a zombie/monster walking because "IT'S ALIVE")
• le gusta - s/he likes
       (thumbs up)

See PowerPoint here.

New Web Series - Learning Spanish through Stories

Hello everyone!

So I found myself over Thanksgiving relaxing and drawing on my Ipad, only to realize that I could make sub-par drawings and narrate them in Spanish, after some tweaking on the computer.  And Voila!  I have my very own Comprehensible Input videos that will slowly get more complicated each video to help learners acquire the language versus working on the grammar out-rightly.

The best part, they'll be short and each will cover a structure as we tell a story.  I'll then recycle that structure in future videos.

Each story will be about 10 episodes long and then we'll move on to a different story.  The structures will get increasingly more difficult as we go and eventually I would imagine some pretty intense storylines.

Here's the first video & second video starting from scratch!  I think I'll do a version in English as well.

Let me know what you think!  I'm excited and I think it turned out kind of neat!

Read about my first storytelling venture from a few years back:
http://profesoranonimo.blogspot.com/2012/07/tprs-year-2-online-storytelling.html

or see my first and second interactive storytelling attempts on Youtube:
story 1 & story 2

TPRS Year 3 - Story/Song combo - Me cortaron mal el pelo

So many moons ago I stumbled across a song that was really catchy to me in a silly way.  It's from this show 31 minutos in Chile, which is kind of like a Sesame Street type show, although I'm not as sure about the educational value of it.  After reading up on it, it seems more like some of the cartoons, like Pinky and the Brain, that were as popular with adults as they were with children.

But I digress.  So I found this song called, Me cortaron mal el pelo (they cut my hair poorly).  I wasn't ever really sure what to do with  the song until recently.

You see I've been storytelling the past few years, and it has occurred to me that ANYTHING can help us come up with our structures for storytelling in class.  I needed to talk about some of the things so my students could better understand the Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto (Pirates of the Caribbean and the secret map) novel we started.

And the song is fairly simple and lends itself wonderfully to creating a story with some structures I needed to get some more reps of anyways.  Feel free to adapt it as needed for your classrooms and let me know if you come up with other ideas for it or if you end up using it.

Here were my structures (since I used the phone story last week and they went well together):

• ya no podía ir a la escuela
       s/he couldn't go to school any longer
• "Puedo cortar tu pelo"
      "I can cut your hair"
• le cortó mal el pelo
    s/he cut his/her hair poorly

TPRS Year 3 - Story - telephone

So I was trying to find something to help go over some structures involving, "couldn't" or "can't" in Spanish and I came across this story script from Jim Tripp that I bought from Ben Slavic's site.  I really think there are some gems in this book.

The basic idea in Jim's version was that a person called someone and that person hung up the phone.  I adapted the story from Jim Tripp's book.  But the structures I used were the following:

• Contestó el teléfono    s/he answered the phone
• No podía entender / hablar              
      s/he couldn’t understand / speak
• colgó el teléfono     s/he hung up the phone 

* I was also trying to get more repetitions of llamó (s/he called) since that was in our weekend chat yesterday.

I tried it out in both Spanish 1 & 2.  Of course in Spanish two I could focus on some different things than with Spanish 1.  And of course the language was more complex at times and we could review more words.  But the general idea was the same.

I recently had acquired a telephone as well and I thought it would be the perfect prop.

So I asked if there was a boy or a girl.  We went over all of that.  I then asked where he/she was.  Then what was he/she doing (had to translate that... since we hadn't used it too much).  Then we had each person doing something in the place and suddenly, they heard a phone.  The phone rang, they looked for it, found it, and answered it.  Someone called them.  They couldn't understand.  They hung up.  On a different day, someone else called, they couldn't understand because they couldn't speak whatever language was being spoken and they hung up.  Most classes got to two days for sure.  A few classes got to three days.

In one of my classes, a student told me, "Thanks for making class so fun today."  To which I replied, "No.  Thanks to your class.  You guys are the ones who made it interesting."

All in all a blast of a day!  My students and I sure needed it.

*Note to self* Props can really help a story.

TPRS year 2 - Spanish 1 Story idea

So yesterday during our weekend chat activity... I had the following two structures to talk about my weekend that I thought could really turn into a riveting storyline later...

• me desperté (I woke up) 
•  sentí (I felt)

Of course these quickly switched to the third person when I started asking about a student:

• se despertó (s/he woke up)
• sintió (s/he felt [object])   vs.  se sentía (s/he felt [emotion])

And through circling, the storyline quickly developed into someone waking up being disoriented and feeling something (possibly a body or something else).

In one class, two students woke up in a prison and one was still unconscious.  In another class, a student woke up with one leg in a bathroom and a cat.  In another, a girl woke up in a the trunk of a car with 6 dead skinny people with big butts...

As you can see, the variety was interesting according to each class and we practiced the structures.  I wonder if the kids related to this becuase of movies like The Hangover.  Either way it was fun to play around with.  Also you could go backwards as well as forwards in the storyline.  Most of my students like to say, "No recuerda" (S/he doesn't remember).  So most of the questions were very unanswered, but the kids got interesting, comprehensible input as they continue to learn Spanish.

So maybe next year, this might just become one of my standard stories for Spanish 1 or maybe even for Spanish 2 with some different structures.

Día 22 - what to do with Junior High

I really do like Junior High students on a personal level.  They have such energy and enthusiasm for things.  They are incredibly fun to talk to.  Nevertheless, teaching a group and enjoying a group on a personal level are two very different things.

One of the things about TPRS that I was excited about was the idea that I could use the energy of the Junior High students to my advantage in the storytelling.

But for some reason, they did not like my story today.  In fact, they hated it.  I was trying to use a story from Blaine Ray's Look, I can Talk! book.  The storyline is simple.  Nevertheless, the junior high students wanted to have the main character kissing and all sorts of other things.  The storyline was not as riveting for them.  One student commented that the story was boring.  I reminded him that if he was bored in the class, it was his job to suggest things when I needed them to make it interesting.

A strange thing tends to occur in my classroom where students in the Junior High class try and make suggestions before I even ask for suggestions.  Or I have to limit their suggestion to something that fits into the constraint of a very loosely scripted story.  It sounds strange that I would even have to limit it, but there are times when the kids want to throw out so many outlandish things that they get lost by their own craziness.  As a result, I can see further why it's my job to help them sort through the ideas that are able to work and which ones are not with the story.

For example, the students think that when I ask for a place that saying someone's pants is acceptable.  If I play along and have so and so go to someone's pants, the students then get lost and complain that it doesn't make sense that someone went to someone's pants.  I of course explain that everything is possible in Spanish class.  Their suggestion ends up confusing them in the long run.

Tomorrow, I have decided to take a little break from Blaine's materials for the Junior High students specifically and work on some structures that I want to teach them and some storylines that I think they will enjoy more while still acquiring the language.  Let's hope so.