First day writing

Chris Stoltz and some others have been publishing writing samples to show results when using TPRS.  So...with some anxiety, here are some samples of what my kids wrote today, before any French was spoken in class, after a summer off from language.  I will say that I do not feel like I did my best work last year and I am, as most TPRS teachers, a total work in progress.

This is an average student in my French 3 class.  Again, I am really scared to do this, because I know that my kids should be able to do more...but it is what it is...  I am happy with the complexity of the sentences...she uses "who is called" and "one day" and "so..." and "another girl"  Pretty good variety of sentence structures for a student with only 2 years of French.

This is a kid who slept through most classes last year: First day French 3.  He sprinkles in English, but he uses the word "now" and "first," which makes me happy.

But then I see something like this...a transfer student who came from another school and I feel much better.  Even if my kids aren't able to write like the better TPRS teachers, they are still writing better than the traditional teachers' students. First day French 3.

First day French 3 from a very serious student who doesn't talk much in class.  Most words are spelled perfectly, complex sentence structures with a couple of grammar mistakes.

 

First day French 3 from a student who struggled in my class last year but she was always willing to put herself out there and try, even if it wasn't perfect.  I like how she takes chances and just keeps writing what she knows, even if it's repetitive or incorrect.

 



First day French 4 from a student who struggles a lot.  She is mixing up tenses and word order.  Not great, but she is taking chances with structure and conjunctions

Probably my best French 4 student.  She is using the correct past tenses, using the correct helping verb (for the most part), using the past with third person plural correctly, and she has amazing transitions like "this summer," "during (an amount of time)", "after", and "next" 

Anyway, I hadn't had any classes of French 2 kids yet, so I don't have any pictures of my first day French 2 classes yet.  I'll take some tomorrow and post!