My collaboration rock star

Two years ago, I was lucky enough to start working with a student teacher (she wasn't my student teacher...she belonged to my mentor).  She was so excited and eager to learn and eager to teach!  We hit it off right away...  Flash forward a month or two and she got hired to work with me in the district!  I convinced her to go to NTPRS with me in St. Louis and our love affair really began.  I have mentored her for the past year and half and I'm very excited to say that the student is now becoming the teacher!  We've had several snow days recently, and she's been working feverishly on curriculum FOR NEXT YEAR!  Now, I'm a real fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants gal, so I'm really excited to have someone to push me to thinking beyond tomorrow.

So this is what we are going to try to do for next year: 

1.  We are thinking of doing our stories only in the present tense, but still do our weekend talks in the past.  Here's the reasoning and please speak up if you have other ideas:  we will only be teaching level one and our students will go to a non-TPRS classroom for level 2.  The high school teachers don't care too much about how much of the past tense we cover (we're supposed to teach all of the passe compose, but it's always been shoved in at the last part of the year when other jr. high teachers taught out of the book), but they really want those verb endings...  I have really enjoyed telling stories in the past and reading in the present and my level twos are just now really getting into the difference between the two.  If I was able to follow my students beyond the first level, it would be a no-brainer.  Any thoughts or experience on this?

2.  We are going to look at the textbook and actually try to fit in all of the verbs that they are "supposed" to know.  And I know that they really don't know them beyond maybe being able to put an ending on them, but we'll see...

3.  I have gotten into the habit of having no idea where a story is going before I start telling it.  I think this might be a downfall because sometimes I don't know how to wrap up a story and so it just kind of ends up falling flat.  Sometimes it works out brilliantly and I have a home run story that I NEVER would have been able to create on my own, but then there are days when story time comes to an end and I feel like we haven't accomplished anything.  So I think we are going to go back to the table and try to come up with some really good story ideas to really get back to the essence of storyasking (where only the details are decided by the students).  Obviously, if a class has a home-run idea, we would have the flexibility to go with that.

4.  I would like to do more embedded readings with authentic texts

5.  We would like to infuse more culture into our stories and readings so that we don't have to have an English day to explain things like how the Acadians got to New Orleans or who St. Nicolas was.

6.  I really want to experiment with MovieTalk, but I'm not 100% comfortable with it not being 99% comprehensible to students.  It seems like so much fun, but I'm afraid that, even with the visual cues, it might be taking a step away from CI and into the land of Rosetta Stone where students are guessing the meanings of words.  Any thoughts?  (I am not trying to say anything bad about those superstars who are using this!  It sounds amazing, but I haven't done it or seen it done, so I'm a little hesitant...)

What else is working well in your classrooms?  We have not done Kindergarten Day or FVR.  The closest thing I've done to FVR is "Lisons Lundi!" which is where students work on a novel in groups.  When they finish one novel, they can choose another one to work through.