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?