Today I was looking at my first years' five-minute free-writes and it really hit home how much my students are learning. It's interesting, as a language teacher, to watch their progress on this task. They start out first with a few words strung together or phonetic spelling of sentences we have used in class. Then, their fluency starts to increase and they write more and more. At a certain point, they slow down on the writing, but the accuracy increases. It is so fascinating to be able to "prove" all the theories we believe in with TPRS. That fluency precedes accuracy, and that accuracy comes with exposure to the language and not through worksheet after worksheet and drill after drill...
Another thing that warmed my heart today was a review of my preposition chant. I talked about this in a previous blog as a type of "time-waster" to try and get kids to learn location words. Well, today, one of my sloooooow students outshone all others on this chant. I'm sure everyone has had a student like this: super sweet and tries really hard, but the eyes are kind of vacant. Today, I feel like I had a breakthrough with her because, as a cheerleader, the chant really worked for her!! I'm going to make time to sit down with her soon to talk about coming up with gestures for all vocabulary words. I know that this should be a no-brainer part of my TPRS classroom, but I haven't really been using it in class. I'm very hopeful that gestures could be the key to unlocking her brain and helping her learn French!!
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