Advanced with Jason and Blaine Ray

Full disclosure: I missed almost all of this day :(  So here are the VERY few notes that I took.

Morning session: Jason talked about teaching kids how to read and how to use good reading strategies.

I have to point out here that most of my notes from these sessions has been about Alina, and for very good reason.  Alina was the model for the strategies and Jason coached her and pointed out what she was doing to help us learn Romanian.  Jason is incredible and has been teaching with TPRS for much longer than I have.  He has a lot to show all of us, and if you want to read me gush about Jason, check out this blog post where I sat in awe of Jason and his vibe.

Jason, I think, posted this list of things to think about when picking out something to read.  I think I should project it every time before FVR.

He suggested that we teach kids what to do when they encounter a word that they don't know: skip it, guess, or look it up.

In the afternoon, Blaine was teaching how to take the principals of TPRS and adapt them for the upper levels.  It's still a conversation between us and the students.  Again, I came in late, so I was a bit lost about exactly what was going on, but Blaine was talking about how his parents wanted him to be a..., but he always wanted to be a...  Some structures that I wrote down to remember to use in the classroom: My mom wanted me to be....  My dad wanted me to be...  How would I feel if...  If you were my mom, would you make me...  Do you think I should have been...  Would I have been a good...?  Reinforcement that I need to work on coming up with this type of conversation starter.  I actually saw a set of Family Conversation Starter cards this weekend, but they wanted $26 for the set!  So I figured I'd just try to do a better job googling conversation starters.

Then, we watched a Movie Talk (Feel the Punch) with the directive "Think of something you want to know at the end" and after the movie, we talked about all the questions we had.  Then, we can come up with a prequel or sequel together as our "story" for the day.

That's it!  If you went to these sessions and have something to add, let me know or link to your blog post!