End-of-the-year Reflections

Another year under my belt.  I wonder if I will ever feel comfortable with what I've done...I hope not!  I want to keep improving and growing as a teacher.  This year I tried a lot of new things: Movie talk, embedded writing/reading, improv games, etc.  I still feel like I need to do a better job of circling to get my structures in there.  I'm getting better at recycling those structures in later stories, but I need to practice parallel stories and really focusing on the structures instead of the plot.  But MAN, we had some good stories this year.  This year, I did a better job of using actors.  I found some great students who were quiet in their seats, but sparkled in front of the class.  It was awesome to see.  This year, I got to see what a second year student can do after two years of TPRS study.  It was pretty cool, too.  My 4%ers were conjugating verbs like crazy and not even realizing what they were doing.  The lightbulbs were going off during pop-ups.  I even had a student start taking French 3 at the high school with a grammar queen and she was successful!  It was a good year...despite being attacked by the high school teachers.  More on that later....