Daily routines

 In the past couple of years, I have changed my daily routines to make my teaching life more sustainable. Here's what I'm doing that's working for me:

1. Start at the door with a password or a question. In the upper levels, passwords are sentence starters like "It is better that..." or "...before it's too late". In lower levels, this is how I do quick speaking tests. I ask them questions about themselves. If they understand and answer in a complete sentence, they get 5/5. If they make a mistake (Je suis 14 ans), they get 4/5 and if they understand the question but can't answer in French, they get 3/5. This is also a great way for me to check-in with my students to see how they are feeling. BONUS: I play international music on a speaker because most of the modern language classrooms are in this hallway. It's always a party!

2. We start with 5 minutes of silent reading. I've found that starting with 5 minutes of reading is a great way to calm down rowdier classes and it ensures that we do it every day (except Friday, when we throw the routine to the wind...sort of).

3. We do good things (in English). This is a building-wide expectation that we start class with 2-3 minutes of celebration about things that are going well. It's great for community building and keeping a positive vibe.

4. Calendar talk: I had never really understood this and thought it would be BORING after about a week or so. But then I saw Marta Ruiz Yedinak model it during a language lab at iflt 2022...AHA! It makes sense! Here is how it goes in my classes:

• What is the date? (I have a slide with six boxes; five for the five school days and one for the weekend)
• What will the date be tomorrow? And the next day? (practicing those vocabulary words)
• Who is missing to us today? (who is absent)
• What's the weather like? (I skip this a lot in the upper levels)
• Are there any events we need to add to our calendar?: This is where (in my opinion) the magic happens. Kids share sporting events, tests, festivals, etc. If it's a family member's birthday who isn't in school, we offer to call them to sing happy birthday in French. If they are competing or taking a test, we shoot them "sparkle fingers" and say Bonne chance! The next day, we follow up...did you win? did you eat cake? 
• I write these events in the future tense...futur proche for beginners and futur simple for upper-levels

• Conversation quotidienne: We have a question that goes with the "curriculum". Right now in level 2, we are talking about seasons, clothing, and what kids did this summer. So a question we talked about today is "What do you like to do when it snows?" I throw a ball around and every student answers. This is 100% forced output, but they all answer at their comfort and the structures are on the board to help them. In my 4/5 class, Elodie Channa from Canada had a great idea to find a quick TikTok video to hook students to a conversation topic. For example, we are piloting Ben Tinsley's upper-level curriculum on marriage and the question was "Is it good luck if it rains on your wedding day?" I found a TikTok of an outdoor ceremony in Cote d'Ivoire where all of the guests were holding up a tarp over the couple as they were married. Thank you Elodie!!!
• Next is Date Talk, which I am surprised that I've never blogged about. Basically, I google the date in French and it finds the Wikipedia page for that date. I peruse the important events on that date and choose one that I think students would be interested in. I write up some sentences on that person/event and we read it together in class. Here is a link to my slideshow for French. I haven't done a great job of doing this in the upper levels because we have so much more going on.
• Then we do TPR. My colleague and bestie Caitlin McKinney has changed the way I think about TPR. Depending on the level, we change the tense or the pronoun so that students are not always hearing the same words. To begin with a new verb, I might spend a week saying "The class waits, eats, wears, etc." Then, I can change it to "We wait, eat, wear, etc". Then, I could say "The students waited, ate, wore, etc". So brilliant! We only do this for about 2-3 minutes per day and I'm not good at doing novel commands...I just have a slide with the French and randomize them in my head.
  
• Song: Most days we do a song activity where we listen to a song and do a cloze activity and then do grammar puzzles with the structures in the song. Instead of Ne me quite pas (don't leave me) I might ask students to try to say don't leave us.
• THEN, we get to our "curriculum" which could be 10-15 minutes of a movie talk, ask-a-story, game, etc. 

This has helped reduce my stress because I always know what I'm doing for 30 minutes of class every day in every level. 

Welcome back?

 It has been almost FOUR YEARS since I have blogged. And I stopped because I felt like I wasn't adding anything new to the conversation. But in those four years, I've learned quite a lot, changed some things, and hit a low post-Covid that I am just starting to crawl out of. 

I guess I will focus this blog on something that has been really bothering me these last few months. And it is the idea that just because I "teach with TPRS/CI," I don't do anything but tell silly stories about blue cats with six tails. This has always kind of been the assumption, but it hasn't been as black and white as what I've seen lately.

For example, I had a colleague tell me that there is no culture in my curriculum because the stories and movie talks I use in the first two levels are designed to be language-focused. They are easy to adapt to any classroom, any language, etc. While it is true that the story-asking stories do not have culture in them, that does not mean that I do not include culture in my classroom. 

Here are just a few ways I include culture in my beginning classes:

• Date talk (or On this day): For each school day, we highlight a francophone person, holiday, or event in history. The students are exposed to a multitude of French-speaking people on a daily basis.
• Cultural articles: One of my colleagues has done an exceptional job of finding strange news stories that go along with our non-culture-centric stories. For example, we use an old story from Look I Can Talk about special chocolate (mainly because the original story has the character going to Lee's Summit, where we live and teach!). To supplement that, we have a reading on the best chocolatier in France.
• Manie Musicale: Thank goodness for this group of sharing teachers and their work to include diverse voices!

I'm sure there are so many more, but I'm drawing a blank.

Another idea is that, because I am focused on Comprehensible Input, my students never talk or write. That is crazy talk! My students talk from the moment they arrive at my door (with a password or a question of the day) and it doesn't end there! The difference is that I don't correct their speaking unless I am confused and I rarely grade it. I tell them they are competing with what they did last time and not with anyone else. In my mind, it makes no sense to grade all students the same when it comes to production when we know that toddlers all develop their speaking skills on different timelines. 

** A quick side note: I had an AMAZING student a few years ago who LOVED French. She would come in during study hall and work one-on-one with me, watch French TV shows and movies, etc. But her speaking was always a struggle. I had this child for FOUR YEARS before I found out that she didn't start speaking in sentences until she was like four years old. Had I told her she was a failure in French 1 because she mixed up words, she would have dropped out and robbed me of so many memorable moments. I'm sorry, but I refuse to do error correction. 

Okay, this is long enough. What assumptions about CI/TPRS/ADI drive you bonkers?

ACTFL presentation

Thank you SO MUCH for coming to my presentation.  Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or success stories to share!  As promised, here is my presentation.

Picture talk

This summer, during a TPRS workshop I presented, I decided to try something different for me with a picture talk.  Usually I try to find a goofy picture (think Awkward Family Photos) and we talk about that.  This time, I chose a piece of art that I felt represented the structures my "students" (actually teachers) were working on: was, had, wanted.  So I found this painting by Edgar Degas.


Here is the dialogue, in English, of how I used this painting.

Me (pointing to woman): Was there a man or a woman? Woman, right! There was a woman. Who was this woman? Sarah? Yes! The woman was Sarah. Was Sarah beautiful? Yes, she was beautiful. Was Sarah happy? No, Sarah was not happy. Sarah was sad. (Continue until students get bored talking about Sarah).

Next, we moved on to the man and followed a similar script of questions. It turns out, according to my students, that the man was the boyfriend of Sarah. Then, I asked Why Sarah is sad.  Because I had superstar language teachers as students, they were able to answer this question and decided that she was sad because she wanted a different boyfriend. Then we were able to talk about why Sarah didn't want the man as her boyfriend (he smokes and she hates that).

Last week, in a collaboration, another teacher in my school said that she wants to try to use picture talk more this year and I volunteered to do this picture talk for them.  During the picture talk with them, I had another epiphany (for me...superstar teachers are probably rolling their eyes at this point at how lame I am)! Our story followed a similar script, but in our story, the woman and the man were just fighting.  So, I said, "Yes, a week ago they were in their house..." and BOOM! a story evolved that could use actors and different locations outside of the café.  I will definitely do more of this in the future during picture talk.  I can't believe it took me so long to "get" parallel stories or Blaine's magic of talking about what happened outside of a story.

Anyway, we happened to have a former art history major in this collaboration group and she had insight into the painting.  It's called The Absinthe Drinker.  So we thought that it would be a great follow-up reading to type up the actual stories behind paintings as a follow-up activity.

Et voilà! Something new to try if you, like me, haven't quite "gotten" the full potential of picture talk.

Beginning of year 13...reflections on Week 1

Whew!  Back in the classroom and ready to rock and roll.  I had a great but busy summer taking kids to France, celebrating my 40th in Puerto Rico with my rockstar colleague Profe Deida, her hubby and my hubby (I now know the joys of reggaeton), attending and emceeing NTPRS, presenting a workshop in Minneapolis, and trying to keep my own kids entertained.

With all that, I didn't have a ton of time to really reflect on my teaching.  Nonetheless, I did make some changes this year.  Here's my list:

• Room set-up: Last year I had students grab a chair of their choice and move it to their assigned seat.  This set-up and tear-down took way too much time and there were kids who picked the comfortable seats every day so that they could veg out.  This year, I moved the comfy chairs to a reading nook that is only used during FVR time and my "normal" chairs are always in a horseshoe.  Every hour, I take the notebooks for that hour and set them on the chairs so that there is a new seating chart every day.  I can't remember who I stole that idea from, but I read it in a blog, I'm sure.
• So far, I think this is working very well.  I don't have to take so much time at the end of class having them "clean up" and the kids seem more engaged sitting in a more traditional chair.  Plus, the comfortable chairs in the reading nooks seem to get kids more excited about FVR time!
• Better use of notebooks: last year I started with composition notebooks for each student, thinking that they would be able to easily keep everything in one place.  With a disorganized teacher, that became absolute mayhem as there were papers shoved everywhere.  So this year, I decided to follow my dear friend Elicia's techniques to create a better organized notebook.
• So far, so much better!  Kids' things are on a specific page and it should be easy for them to find and use in the future.  
• Starting with special person: I decided to mix special person with "regular" stories and units so that I can get started more quickly.  Last year and the years before, special person was taking until October to get through and the kids were getting bored with it.
• I think this is working well, but we are only one week in so far, so I'll have to re-evaluate in a month or so.

How about you guys?  What did you change this year and how is it going?

Resources from Minneapolis workshop

I am so sorry that it has taken me so long to get this published.  I had an incredible time with you all!  Please never hesitate to reach out if you have questions or need anything.

Rubrics

• Writing semester 1
• Writing semester 2
• Speaking semester 1
• Speaking semester 2

Sample of powerpoint  Remember that TPRS Books sells a DVD with all the powerpoint stories you could ever want...

Follow Daniel's Facebook page: Waasabiik Ojibwemotaadiwin and youtube

Watch the deer video but only if you are okay with crying a little bit...

More Than a Choice NTPRS presentation

This past week, I got to go to my NINTH NTPRS!!!  Hopefully I will have time soon to sit down and digest my thoughts for you.

In the meantime, Eric Richards, my friend and co-presenter at NTPRS, asked me to upload our presentation on using a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel on this blog.  So, here it is!  Please let me or Eric know if you have any questions!