TPRS year 7 - writing logs

So as a TPRS teacher, I admit that I've never been that great at addressing "timed writes" over the years. I would have students do them. I only ever really had them do a timed write over retelling a class story.

Of course, last year I did add an extra element where they wrote the ending to a story about a person in Spanish 1. Then I had the students read the different endings and vote on them. It was really fun and some of the creativity had me busting up in stitches while we read them out loud. You can see those here.

I cleaned up a little of the grammar, but most of those were as written by the students!  My favorites were in 4a.  If you read the first two versions of the reading, after doing the reading, I think we then read the different endings on paper.  The idea was the trick them into reading in a different context: to find their favorite ending.

This year though, I decided that my Spanish 2 students are really all over the place in their understanding of Spanish due to many different teachers for Spanish 1 and many different experiences in addition to them all being different people.

I used to give an arbitrary number of words that was easily attainable for most to all of them in the 10 minutes. That way they would feel successful. But I would see that one student still might not achieve that for whatever reason and I would feel bad for saying the number in the first place.

Even after the first story, one student might do a 100 word rewrite while one might do a 50 word rewrite while someone else might do a 20 word rewrite. And for all of those students, that is what they can do!

So I thought this year, I could encourage students in their individual differences to improve on THEIR writing.  I want them to record the date of their timed write, the topic, the word count, and then a reflection on where they saw growth in this new writing.

I made a super simple worksheet for this that will go in their folders. I put a picture of a plant growth cycle on their to encourage them in their growth and to focus on that. This way, I can be more fair in the area of writing. If we see growth in their writing, then student with lower ability can still achieve an A or a B because they are also showing growth (in quantity) while a high flyer can easily get that A or B because they will be working on the quality of their writing (and some quantity). It's one of my ideas for differentiation.

We'll see how it goes!

If you wanted to download the template for use, take ideas from to make your own, etc here's what I came up with!

Wish me luck!

Choose the story ending (Writing and Reading Idea)

If you've been doing storytelling, you've probably already thought of this activity before. I came up with it because for the life of me, I couldn't finish the last story and it was losing steam, and I wanted to do a timed write, but in a new way.

What I wanted was a conscious extra pass over the structures from our story. So I did an embedded reading of their story so far.

Here are the structures we were working on in their story.

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 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!

Día 45 - Freewriting

I find myself unable to start much new on Friday and then expect the students to continue with whatever thing next week without confusion or resistance.  So today I decided to do a freewrite.

The idea of a freewrite is to encourage the students to write as much as they can in the language.  You set the timer to 10 minutes or however many and let them write.  At the end of the freewrite, you have them count up the words (could include places and names since they're proper nouns) and then have them write the number of the words and circle it at the bottom.  Then as a teacher you can go through, leaving comments, or highlighting the parts you understand of their papers.

The purpose is to encourage their writing in the target language, which of course you're building up over time.  It also helps to see which students can internalize the language to use. 

Of course, today I might have flopped a little bit.  I told the students that the goal was 100 words and gave them 12 minutes to accomplish this feat.  In the future I might give a little more especially if it is a Friday activity and it's creative writing.  Maybe I should try 20 minutes to make sure they have more time.  It's also a reflection of my teaching and if I have done enough circling so that they can more or less understand the language to try to produce a little.

Today I left the structures we've been going over on the board and let the students run rampant.  In the future I can probably not even wore about some of the more common structures we've worked with unless the students ask me to write it on the board.

I've read a few of them and the Spanish 1 students of course had the hardest time.  Their processing of the language is a little slower (naturally) than my other students who are more used to me speaking Spanish from previous years (even though it wasn't through storytelling).  But my hope is to use the Spanish 1 students as my basis for next year to have an idea of expectations.

But I also made sure to explain that we're working towards the goal of being able to write 100 words or more by the end of the year in Spanish.

Día 16 - End of class writing assignment

Today I had my students do a write up at the end of class.  I gave them 10 minutes apiece and depending on if I had been able to do writing with them before or not, I determined my expectations.  For some of the classes, I told them a really small number like 30.  But I made sure to explain that more is better and if they can do more than 30 I expect them to.  Some students who normally would not do more than they were asked did.  I'll have to make sure to praise each of those students when they get their papers back.

Or maybe I could start doing 'homework pass' for a homework writing assignment or something like that for those kids who write the most.  It's good to give them a reward for doing more work.

I was proud of the students who did what I asked and more.  I only had a few students who were not able to get the number of words.  This only frustrates me as a teacher because I should have been better at encouraging them and making sure they were paying attention.

In my Junior High class, I know that sometimes their attention is a little bit of a problem.  It's the last class of the day and they are squirmy junior high students!  It's hard sometimes to keep their attention.  Regardless of what I try, they can easily get off task.  But hey, I'll still working on this method.  What I was saddened to find out was that they were not keeping up their part of the bargain in class because many of them did not write the story that we had talked about in class.  It almost seemed as though they didn't follow most of the story.  One or two of the students did.  I don't have to worry about them because language comes more naturally.  But the rest seemed to miss out on all of the fun details and even the basic skeleton of the story.  This worries me because storytelling is not useful if they are not understanding the language.

The purpose of this assessment is to help me figure out what they know by the end of class when it is still fresh in their minds.  I will probably try again today to see what they come up with.  Maybe Friday was just an off day.

I need to do assessments more often in class instead of assuming that they understood.  As Friday proved in the one class, I was way off on my estimates of their level of understanding.

Día 14 - Writing

TPRS is all about learning through telling stories.  This can be orally or in written format.

Hopefully, the students get better and better at telling stories.  I have been focusing on telling the stories orally.  In the Look I can Talk book by Blaine Ray, he gives you a reading as well as an extended reading.  In the teacher's guide, he gives discussion questions for the class as they read the story.

I understand that the purpose is to get the students to read as well as learn to talk simultaneously.  We also teach the past in class speaking while the stories are in the present tense.  In essence, this helps the students learn to the tenses at the same time.  It makes sense.  In my experience, the students who are taught only the present tense in the first year always use it as a security blanket.  Why should that be if everyday language incorporates more than one tense?

One of the things that you can do to assess your students after a story is to have them write a summary of what you talked about in class.  Depending on how much time is left in class might affect your expectations for how much they write.  I have been finding myself getting through the story and forgetting about that part of the class.  I do need to encourage my students to write as early as possible because we tell the stories so much in class orally, it should be an easy enough transition for them to write the stories in Spanish.

I have done it with a few classes once so far and I was surprised by the results.  They do a great job overall.  I tried to give them an easy goal to accomplish in 5 minutes like 30 words or something.  In one class I had a student write almost 100 words in the 5 minutes left.  He was obviously more advanced in his ability to communicate.  But his enthusiasm is what I hope all of the students can come to have in class.

So I challenge myself to have my students write more about their stories instead of forgetting about that part of the storytelling process.  We need to review the information in various ways instead of just moving on to new stories.  We can easily play with the old stories to make sure to continue to practice the structures.