Spanish with Blaine Ray

I always look forward to my Spanish lessons with Blaine.  He is such an amazing teacher, I love to see him in action, and I always learn something new by watching him.

This year, he said that there is a huge gap in our classrooms between what we teachers think they are understanding and what the students actually feel confident about.  We need to recognize that and find ways to repeat repeat repeat and slow down without making it seem overly simplistic.

Last year, I implemented the following five steps to creating details:

1. Teachers says a statement to the class (Meredith is beautiful).
2. Teacher asks the actor (Meredith, are you beautiful?)
3. Actor answers in a complete, accurate sentence that is written for them to read. (Yes, I am beautiful)
4. Teacher repeats and agrees with actor (Yes Meredith, you are beautiful)
5. Teacher reports back to the class (Class, she is beautiful)

In this way, we are bouncing back and forth between 3rd, 2nd, and 1st person without it sounding awful or overly repetitive.

This year, I plan to do this and implement Bryce's movement (moving to a different location during step 1 and 5) to help differentiate the points of view.

Blaine says to repeat this until kids have a feeling of confidence in one sentence.  This takes practice with parallel characters (and always use yourself...that way when you talk to your actors, they are also practicing speaking in all 3 points of view).  The actors are allowed to make minor grammar mistakes (prepositions or adj agreement) as long as the verbs are correct.