TPRS year 3 - review

Well the school year ended a week or two ago and it was my third year of using TPRS and CI.

As far as the year, I would say it was a success.  It was probably the most intense year I have ever gone through with ups and downs and the variety of activities.

I worked hard in making sure things stayed fresh while at the same time maintaining the general consistency of class.

In first quarter in my Spanish 1 classes, we did PQA about the students, their loves, their interests.  They picked up some basic conversational words and a lot of the third person forms of verbs that interested them.  Then we finished up with TPR of the body parts and some other concrete action words that we could act out.

By the time we got to second quarter, I introduced the routine of class:

Monday - Trending Tweets and Weekend chat

Tuesday - Joke and Oral Story (past tense)

Wednesday - Miáucoles and finishing Oral story

Thursday - song 

Friday - Fail and written story

We continued to prep the Spanish students' understanding of words that would appear in the first book Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.  

Then by the time we read the book, we still did a little storytelling and the usual warm up activities and by the time second quarter had ended, my Spanish 1 students felt a sense of success.  A couple of the kids weren't doing as well as the rest for various reasons, but they were still learning.  Some did hate the book.

Third quarter, we started off with a PQA activity because of a structure common to Spanish 1 students and in the next book to be read, ir + a + infinitive.  So I had the students talk about a goal they had for the new year.  We talked about those for a few weeks and I tried something new out….

I wanted to try to get some of the first and second forms into the verb paradigm.  In my first two years of TPRS, I noticed students didn't do much more than the 3rd person singular of the verbs.  This is the most easily acquired form in language, which is why children speak in 3rd person at first.  

But I still figured we should try to introduce those other forms little by little in the year.  So I had the question written on the board, "¿Qué vas a hacer?" (What are you going to do?) and then underneath I wrote "Voy a ____r" (I'm going to…) and "va a ____r" (s/he is going to __).  

Then I asked kids to own their phrase so that when I asked them, they could respond, "Voy a _____."  It was a great attempt.  Some kids didn't seem to get it as well.  Perhaps to have butcher paper on the wall for different classes so that the words stayed on the wall until the unit was over might be nice.  Maybe next year we can do that.  Otherwise, I thought it went well.  The complete conjugation of verbs is something that not even traditional Spanish students completely get the hang of.  So I figured I was doing a better job.  They had a pretty good understanding of the "n" at the end meaning "They" from second quarter.

So long story short, I think we managed to get the other forms hit during the year.  

After the PQA activity, we started storytelling and further prepping the kids to be able to read the second book Piratas del Caribe y el maps secreto.   While reading, we continued doing the other activities (storytelling, jokes, songs, etc).  

By the final test on Pirates, I was able to see that my students were learning this year and were learning to write sentences to express their understanding of the book. 

All in all, I would say the year was a success.  Many of the kids retrospectively appreciated the books because they realized how much Spanish they had learned this year.

I would say that this year has further reinforced my love for TPRS and CI teaching.  Throughout the year, I was able to converse with my Spanish 1 students daily.  I was never able to converse with my Spanish 1, 2 or 3 students as well before when we "covered" grammar and vocabulary.

I look forward to the coming years!

TPRS Year 3 - Days 1 and 2

Well, school just got back into full swing as we returned to having students on Tuesday.  My goals this year are to worry less about the actual storytelling (because it seems to be coming more and more naturally) and to instead worry about my students.  Last year I noticed I did better at monitoring students' lack of understanding.  That seems to be more heightened this year.

The first day went very well.  I think I got the idea from Ben Slavic to teach the first day while slowly teaching the classroom expectations during the first week or two.  Most kids aren't going to listen anyway if you just give them a list of rules the first day.  I wouldn't listen if someone did that to me.  So the idea is to show that everyday we will be learning Spanish (even on the first day).  This helps me set the tone for the year.  It also is very common that teachers might think of the first day where they don't have to teach very much and they can use it as a sort of day off.  I would rather be teaching though than babysitting.  If I am babysitting the kids, there are always more personality conflicts and kids not doing what they should be doing.  I think the best way to have a "day off" (of classroom management problems) is to teach.  When kids are engaged, they cause fewer problems.

For Spanish 1 and 8th grade, they drew a picture of something that they like to do and we started talking about me and how "The teacher plays guitar" (in Spanish).  Then we circled that information a little bit.  Afterwards, I moved on to a student or two and compared and contrasted their activities to mine.  This is another idea I have gotten (and used before) from Ben Slavic.  The more I do it, the better I get at throwing out more language to the students in a comprehensible way and also doing more short grammar explanations.

For Spanish 2, I had them draw two pictures about what they did over the summer.  The idea was to review stuff from last year while throwing in some new information and getting to re-familiarize myself with them.  I did notice that I would throw in some structures from last year and check for comprehension and most of my students from last year would remember those structures.  The only difficulty is that I have students who had the previous Spanish teacher (the year before I came) and they have no clue what we're talking about.  They did grammar-based homework out of the textbook all year.  Guess how great that was for their acquisition of the language!  Yep.  Not so great.  So they are keeping me mindful of making sure I do go slow and point and review even more so the structures from last year.

All in all, they were both good days.  On day 2, we continued the activities and they'll probably take me a few weeks to finish.  If I finish early in a class with getting to know everyone, hopefully we'll have plenty of fodder from different things we talked about to create short narratives or I can do some one-word images.  I already notice myself going off on tangents and asking about the names of the chicken they play soccer with or anything else that might be relevant to make it interesting.

TPRS - year 3 - Pacing Guides

So the past two years with tprs, I was getting my feet wet. I didn't worry too much about curriculum or standards or all that jazz. In my small districts, they have to focus most of their attention on the core classes. 

It has been nice for me to simply focus on teaching and to be able to dabble with TPRS without really worrying about having to plan too much!  It's helped me work on honing my skills in being able to do PQA (personalized questions and answers), circling, and storytelling as well as being able to try out some different activities like Kindergarten Day, the weekend report, etc. 

But this year is my second year at the same school and we have new administration.  I teach one section of 8th grade Spanish (that switches every quarter), Spanish 1 and Spanish 2. 

We unofficially had Spanish 3 mixed with Spanish 2, but the new administrator said no. Some of my students who wanted to be in Spanish 3, kept asking and then told me that they were really looking forward to it this year. 

My administrator told me that the only way I would be able to have a Spanish 3 class is if I were to write up Pacing Guides for my classes to be voted on by the school board. So I finally finished them Tuesday night after two late nights of working on them. 

Then I had to revise them because I only had written them by quarter instead of by month.

Here's a link of youd like to see them. I'm not incredibly proud of them because I had to rush, but it gives an idea of what I'll be teaching this year. 

TPRS year 2 - Working with novels

So this next year, another teacher and I decided that we should really work a lot more with the readings in teaching through TPRS since increasing the students' literacy is what will really help them acquire the language much better than anything else.

There are all sorts of TPRS novels that use 200 or so high frequency words or less.

We decided to choose a few novels for each level and then teach backwards and determine the structures in each novel that we should then teach to the students so by the time we read the novels, the students will feel more like it's easy to read.  I think this will also help me not feel like I am just taking random structures and teaching them just because.  It will help me have more of a sense of purpose to my teaching with TPRS.

The first two years I worked with TPRS, I really was working more on the form such as: circling, PQA, going slow, teaching to the eyes, and other things mentioned in TPRS workshops as well as Ben Slavic's books.

But this last year I really felt as though I hadn't done an adequate enough job of getting my students about to read a novel.  So this year we'll work harder on getting to that goal.

This also coincides nicely with something my school wanted to encourage with the Native / Heritage Spanish speakers.  There are some who know Spanish and had to learn English after immigrating to the US that never were able to learn how to understand what they read in grade school.  By the time they get to high school, this skill has become more and more necessary in classes.  So if I can help the Native / Heritage speakers to read in Spanish and work on things like talking about the main character and plot points, etc, then this will also help them in their English (Literature) classes as well as other classes where synthesizing information that has been read is an integral part of the class.

I'll be slowly charting out my plan(s) for the year as I figure them out.  I recently ordered about $90 worth of TPRS novels from tprspublishing... hopefully I can find some to plan with.