Day 2-Spanish with Blaine

Today in Spanish class, we had some teacher questions about discipline. I agreed to be the obnoxious student so that Blaine could model discipline for us. The thing that that taught me is the dynamic pesonality that Blaine has is truly magical. I really really really didn't want him to be mad at me. I'm not sure if that's a representation of Blaine or of my people-pleasing nature... He reacted to everything with love. He turned to me when I was talking and said with a smile, "Hey kiddo, this is not going to work if you are talking. For this to work, you can't talk, write or sleep. That's a pagame" He explained that pagame are worth 5 points of participation points per grading period (100 total possible). They can earn these points back by making a nice card for him, shaking his hand to have a genuine bonding moment or writing a 100 word essay. He validated me so much during that "class period" and said at the end that those kids who are attention seekers or having a bad day are the ones that his heart goes out to. Those are the kids that he really wants to reach. People pleaser? Maybe this will work for me.

On to the notes!


Whenever there is a choral response to an info-seeking question, don’t take that answer so that they are shocked! I love this idea. As a student, it really made me sit up and take notice. I think I blogged about this already, but if I didn't...I'd be happy to re-explain in the comments section.

Add extra details that you “forgot” the first time through the story. Blaine would go to re-tell the story and then get "stuck" on some tiny bit of information that he forgot to create interest and extra reps. For example, we were continuing with a story that we had been working on for 3 hours. In this story, there was an elephant in an internet cafe in New Zealand who saw the facebook of the most beautiful girl in the world... There's a ton more to the story, but this was all basic information established very early. He came back to it. Class, there is an elephant...where is the elephant...was he alone? (new information) No! He wasn't alone! I forgot to tell you! He was there with his mom and his dad! Then we talked about them. They were divorced. The mom lived in Minneapolis and was friends with the mosquito we had been talking about...it went on and on describing these two super-minor characters that he had "forgotten" to tell us about the first time through the story.

Basic structure of story-telling
1. Establish problem 2. Character development 3. Go somewhere and try to solve problem/doesn’t work 4. Resolution

When Blaine is "lesson planning," he starts with a couple of sentences and he knows the resolution before he begins. The middle can go anywhere.

More on discipline: We talked about rudeness rom students. He gave the example of using a student and asking: Is there a girl or an elephant? A student yells out "Elephant!" Blaine goes to the student and says: This does not work if you do that. You cannot say that she’s an elephant. She’s not, she’s a girl. What we’re doing does not work if you’re doing that. –Blaine
Take care of discipline problems in English.

One of the greatest tips that I saw was to use the actors to verify information, using you and I… This adds a ton of interest for the students, increases reps, and introduces 1st and 2nd person.

Part of my "acting out" was begging to be in the story. When I asked to be the elephant, he came, hugged me, and said “Honey, I love you, but this is my story…we’ll get to you another time” That hug shut me up. I think I've always been afraid to touch my students because of the fear of being sued or something. I'm going to get over that. Seriously.

This is a quote from one of the teachers in our class. Her name is Jammie and she was trying to explain why you don't correct speaking when a student makes a mistake:
"When you correct a child learning a language, they are not developmentally ready for the correction. When you say “no” to form, they think you are correcting the content. No, you don’t say I goed to the store, you say I went to the store…That’s what I said! "

Day 2-Intermediate class with Von Ray

Here are some notes that I took from the presentation. They don't follow a narrative, so please excuse!

Students pass through 5 phases :
1. There are slow processors who can’t produce. (These would be your focus students)
2. There are fast processors who can produce very little.
3. There are fast processors who can produce with hesitation and errors.
4. There are fast processors who produce with accuracy and hesitation.
5. There are speakers with fluency or ease of expression.
Until the students reach level 5, they need repetition and circling. More time with the structure until it becomes natural.

During a story, you only have 3 options: Go back and add novel information, circle, go forward.

The goal is to practice the language and make the story last as long as we can make it last. It is not to get to the climax!! (I think I need to focus on this more. Just parking with circling and adding more details. I think that's the biggest thing I've gotten this week)

Two reasons to circle: turn slow processors into fast processors, to practice new or difficult structures. Circling is boring when sentences are short or when the structures are not new or difficult
Faster processors: review the facts of the story, add details, start over, and keep asking known details. These students can always benefit from extra repetitions to get to ease of expression

Parallel character (this is what we focused on today): a student in the class or a celebrity who parallels the story of the main character to add more practice for the structures without getting tedious. Add details about the parallel character to extend the story. Then we talk about the problem with that parallel character and come up with the resolution. You have to decide if the parallel character is interesting enough to continue with the parallel story. If it’s not, talk about it for a minute and then continue with the main story. It can have a connection to the main story, but it doesn’t have to!

Quote from Von: We’re always looking for students who want to play by raising their hands and adding details. If no students want to play, you can pick a student or use a celebrity.

Big idea:Contradict what the students think is the correct answer to increase interest. I noticed that this really caught my attention when I was a student in the language classes. I was always really surprised and laughed at the answer. We would be following a story and the teacher would ask a question that we thought we knew the answer to through inference of the story. We would answer one way and the teacher would say, No! You're wrong, it's actually (something bizarre). AFter lots of circling, it's great to be surprised by some new bit of information that's a little shocking.

Try to stick to the same thread. Parallel story should have just one thread and one problem with a resolution. Just make sure that you keep to the main structures!! You can add details and characters as long as we’re working towards the resolution of the problem.

These are some notes from the coaching session with Michelle Kindt:

When a story crashes and burns, just abandon it. You can have them draw 6 boxes and have them draw the story as you re-tell. Or, you cannot finish it and have the students finish it as homework…

When a kid really talks a lot in the TL, give them praise, let them finish and then say “don’t be intimidated by _____, she’s special and this is coming really quickly to her.”

Michelle used index cards as circling cards for each statement. Character 1 wants to have dinner with character 2. Keep other ideas for the characters or verb written down there for circling. She has them numbered so she can go through the circling easier.

"We can get our kids to love French so much that they keep taking it or so much that they travel. This leads to world peace…" Michelle Kindt-French coach What a beautiful thought. I'm an optimist too! Wouldn't it be nice if we were making such a huge difference in our classrooms every day??

Day 1-Cultural storytelling with Barb Cartford

I brought away a few things from my session with Barb. First, she loves children and she loves her languages. She also really loves all the things that make people people (art, family, values, etc). She told us that she was using the popularity of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in her adult Swedish classes and that she would be wearing a costume to become here on Tuesday. Amazing.

Okay, here's what I took away from this session, my goals for infusing culture into my class:

• use history and biographies as stories and reading
• use French art to teach colors, body parts, family, etc
• use children's tales and compare them to well-known American stories (ex. Asterix v. Mickey Mouse)
• Use costumes!!

Barb told us about her Frida unit. This is how she works the biography of Frida into her lesson plans:

1. Establish meaning of new vocabulary the first day
2. 2-4th day: tell about the life of Frida using actors, visuals, and props. There should be at least 3 phases in her life (childhood, young adulthood, old age)
3. Show the works on the 5th day, using a jigsaw activity. Each student gets a questionaire about art (What jumps out to you? What is the feeling of the painting? How do you think the artist felt when he/she was painting this? etc) with a color and a number on it. The colors group the students to a particular painting. The students get together and discuss the painting to become "experts" at that particular painting. Then, they are grouped by number so that each group has one "expert" for each painting. The number groups travel around the room and the expert tells what his/her group found out about the painting...more discussion.

I LOVE this idea and can't wait to steal it. I would also like to add a day where the students mimic the style of the artist.

Day 1-Spanish with Blaine

This was my first time meeting Blaine or seeing him teach. AMAZING! I also have to say that Sunday night, when we were checking in, I saw this adorable blonde woman catch sight of Blaine, say hi, and then beam like she had just met the president. I certainly understand her state of mind. It is pretty cool to be in a room with the creator of something so magical.

Here are some gems I got from the mouth of the guru:

• As he was setting up the class, he said to all of us "I can't feel that this is hard. To me, speaking Spanish is as easy as speaking English. You have to help me. If you stop me, I appreciate it." He really created a climate of encouragement for all students, in my opinion. I feel like I ask students to stop me, but I don't make them understand how important it is or how much I want them to do it.
• He also said that when he asked a question where he wanted us to guess, it had to be a proper noun or in Spanish, because this story is a Spanish story and it doesn't have any English in it. I really liked that. I have a hard time keeping my classes in French...but he does it in such a way that is really magical.
• Finally (for today), we had a student who wanted to know why there are two ways to say "was." His answer, instead of going into rules and long explanations, was that there are two ways, he knows how to use them correctly, and we are just supposed to listen and try to absorb until we get the feeling for which one we're supposed to use. Brilliant! It's an easy way to explain our methodology to students without going into long pedagogy discussions.

More tomorrow (hopefully if my husband doesn't keep me out too long at the Cubs game!)

Day 1-Intermediate class

Von Ray was/is the teacher for this class. He had us laughing with stories about his struggles with traditional language learning (oh, can't we all relate!). Here are some gems that I gleaned from his presentation:

• We can infuse interest in our stories by using famous people, exaggeration, and irony
• In the beginning of TPRS, the students don't have the language to be able to answer open why questions. We have to work up to that to ensure that students are using the TL (or proper nouns) to respond to our questions.
• We were talking a lot about how to keep interest high. Von taught us a story using German, to try and show us how many repetitions a new learner needs before feeling comfortable in the TL. It was quite a few. He used inflection, whispering, yelling, emotions, and random noises to keep us engaged in the simple story. Then, when we had that part down, he went back to the beginning and it wasn't boring! This was an eye-opener to me...to see just how much repetition is necessary to really get something stuck in my head (obviously the point of the exercise)
• He did a pop-up grammar of the difference in the verbs for singular and plural subjects. The student didn't give him exactly the answer he was looking for, but he praised the student and moved on. He said that he would come back to it in about 5 minutes or so to see if he could get the answer he was looking for. If not, no big whoop!

After the brief presentation, we were broken into smaller groups for peer coaching. I was so scared of this! Especially after almost 2 months of no teaching. But I was the third volunteer to be coached on "advanced" circling (circling out of the traditional order). I got lots of praise, but was told that I need to focus energy on circling the stuff I want them to actually learn and not the stuff that they already know. That was a "Duh!" moment for me. I'm excited to go back tomorrow and see what else I can learn.

I have to say that everyone I have encountered has been so kind. I know that teachers have a special kind of heart, but I think that TPRS teachers go beyond that. We truly are a special little community of colleagues looking to better our craft and each other. And I don't think that it's too far of a stretch to say that we want to better the world too. I know that Ben Slavic talks a lot about decreasing the achievement gap among his students. I feel that power here with me in Chicago.

To go a little further on this tangent, I ate lunch today with an amazing woman named Dixie. We happened to be in the lobby together at the same time looking to eat, so we decided to go together. We talked about our experiences with TPRS (mine being pretty short and hers going back to the beginning!) in different school districts with different ages and different SES. We shared our hopes for the world and language learning. It was a great experience and I hope it was just one of many I'll have this week (which may be difficult since I have to spend some time with my husband!)

NTPRS-Initial observations

I got here last night and, I have to admit, I'm a little bummed that I brought my husband along. Yes, it's super nice to have a week's vacation with my hubby and no kids, but we've got plans in the evenings that don't always involve me getting to hang out with the other TPRSers.

I've already met Laurie Clarcq...so sweet. She actually spotted my nametag and called me out. I'll be excited to talk to her more about loving kids and embedded readings.

I'm hoping to add all of my notes on here as the week progresses...

Passe Compose

I haven't blogged lately because I have a bit of teacher-itis. I absolutely cannot WAIT for this year to be over. I have had some really bad days coupled with a super-long winter. I'm done!

Anyway, today something happened that merits blogging about. During state testing, there were a lot of days where I was supposed to be in two buildings at once because of overlapping schedules. (I travel, and my schedule is a bit strange) Because of that, I had to come up with lesson plans for my kids that they could do without me. I decided to give my second year students a huge packet of worksheets (yuck!) over the passe compose because I figured it couldn't possibly hurt them and they would get a little exposure to it before moving on to the next teacher at the high school. I didn't teach them anything over the passe compose outside of little pop-up grammar points about how to say We did this or They did that. They are really good at using first person past because we use it every Monday to talk about what they did over the weekend. Today, one of my students said that he went to a friend's house. I asked what he did there and he thought for a second and said "Nous avons mange de la pizza and nous avons joue des jeux videos." He is a smart kid, but not one to do homework or study at all. Is it a stretch to say that he picked that up from pop-up grammar and can now use it in authentic situations?? Is that real acquisition??