I am almost to the end of my 9th year teaching, which makes it my 7th year teaching almost exclusively with TPRS. Each year, I try to think about how I can improve next year so that I can focus on that when I am at NTPRS in July. Otherwise, there are just too many great ideas and my brain gets overwhelmed.
So, here is a meandering reflection of what worked and what can be improved after this year.
1. Special Person: I have always started the year with Circling with Balls, but I used to make up silly details to make the story more interesting. I realize now that it doesn't have to be crazy to be interesting to the kids. As long as I am interested, they are interested. We started off talking forEVER about names, reinforcing the Je vs Tu vs Il/Elle. Since parking on this one concept for so long was new to me, I checked in with some of the high flyers to see if they were bored (since I was bored repeating myself so slowly for so long). They said that it was interesting and that it didn't seem that repetitive because we were talking about each kid in the class, so they could each have their turn. During this "unit", I was able to teach family vocab, including possessive pronouns, careers, numbers, most of the action verbs (play, watch, swim, run, etc), and we had a good time doing it.
2. Using actors and verifying details: I started doing this last year, but really focused on it a lot more this year. I found that it is super important to do this when you are telling the story in the past, because it is a natural way to re-tell the story in the present from different points of view. If you have never seen a master teacher like Blaine do this, let me know so I can try to explain it better.
3. Mystery Skype: This is something I did because my neighbor teacher was trying it. We Skyped a French-speaking person from somewhere in the world and the students each had a role to play in trying to figure out where they were. Roles included map expert, question asker, question writer, host, and so on. I found my mystery skypers by asking my French-speaking friends on Facebook if they would be willing to Skype in. We had a family in Annecy, a college student in Lyon, a former classmate in Copenhagen, and a French elementary teacher in Vermont. The kids got really excited and it was great for me to see how we could use collaboration and roles in sync with technology in a realistic way for a common goal.
4. Business partner: In our town, we are lucky enough to have an ice cream company which is expanding to Canada. I reached out to ask them if we could do some creative marketing for them for their French-Canadian stores. We started by going to the offices and taking a tour, which was facilitated by their bilingual customer service agent and then we spent a week in class creating our marketing products, which included memes, print advertisements, video advertisements, and Snapchat filters. We then did a Google Hangout with the marketing team in California and some of the employees here in Missouri to share our plans. While it wasn't 100% in French, it did give the kids an idea of what a bilingual job could look like in the real world. The kids had a blast, got a ton of free ice cream, and the company was really happy with what we produced. I'm trying to think of ways to integrate more real-world tasks like this in the future.
Next post...what I need to improve for next year!
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