The Event with Blaine and Von Ray

For some dumb reason, I did not bring a notebook to NTPRS this year, so I am scrambling to find paper and bits of blank space to take my notes....dumb me!

So Tuesday morning, I got to spend the day with two of my favorite people: Blaine and Von Ray.  They were working on how to create "an event" which used to be called a bird walk.  Basically, this is the way that you take a story and then go back in time to add details that were left out of the original story.  For example: the original story says that Betty was afraid of dogs, but doesn't go into much detail.  You can then take the characters back in time to dramatize what happened to make Betty afraid of dogs.

This was a great session because we got the chance to brainstorm ways to make an event given a particular story.  I didn't take many notes because there was a lot of chance to practice, and thus not a lot of concepts that were given.  Or rather, we were SHOWN how to do it instead of just given the information.  For whatever reason, I didn't take a lot of notes to share with you.

But here's the AHA...blow-your-mind moment of the day.  As we were coming back from lunch, Blaine was sitting there talking to us about how we have been successful and what our kids can do, etc.  I said that I hoped that Diana Noonan would sell her assessments at some point so that we could all prove what our kids can do.  And Blaine said that he had a super easy assessment that we can all use in our classrooms to prove proficiency because the questions are based on the TOP MOST COMMON VERBS in the Spanish language (and I'm going to assume that they are very similar in the French language).  Anyway, Blaine would really like for us to give this test to our kids to see how many are successful.  Here is the test (translate to your own TL):
Answer in a complete sentence:
1. Do you have a book?
2. Are you a girl or a boy?
3. What do you study?
4. Do you go to school?
5. Where are you?
6. Do you want any chocolate?
7. Do you like to speak TL?
8. What is there in your house?
9. What do you do when you are not in school?
10. Can you speak TL?

When you are grading this, you are only looking for subject and verb correctness (except for do you like to speak...then each part of that gets a half of a point).  Each correct verb is one point.  Blaine wants to see what percentage gets all correct and what % gets 9/10, etc.  So if you give this exam to your students...please send Blaine the results.

He said that he would assume that most TPRS students should be able to produce 80-90 words in a 5 minute free-write by the end of French 1 and that they should be graded on a 6 point scale.  1-2 is for consistent basic errors.  3-4 is mostly right (for verbs) and 5-6 is very few errors (maybe 1 error for every 10 words or less).  He says that in order to be graded, the student must have produced at least 50 words or the rubric is invalid.

So go!  Give this as a pre-test to your Fr 1 and 2 students and then give it again at the end of the year and keep track of the data!!