Research with Karen Lichtman

This is, I think, the 3rd or 4th session by Karen that I've been to.  There wasn't a whole lot of new research to share, beyond Barb Cartford's new study about the increase in writing fluency over time, but there was one nugget that I adored!  One of the "negative" studies about TPRS showed that TPRS students did worse on listening and Karen supposed that this was because oftentimes, we do not expose our students to authentic speech, so they struggle when they listen to native speakers.  So, the moral of the story is to expose your students early and often.  Karen suggested finding a native friend to record stories from the very first year so that your students can hear what that sounds like.  LOVE THIS!!  If you decide to do this in French, please share your sound files so we can all benefit!

Immersion dinners

This will just be a quick plug for the immersion dinners that they have at NTPRS each year.  They are such a great opportunity to be with like-languaged people and the French teachers are a HOOT!  We had a blast eating at a Cajun restaurant, speaking French, and singing traditional French songs for the entire restaurant.  In fact, the restaurant was so happy that we were entertaining the other guests that they brought over several rounds of shots for the entire table.  Such a fun evening.  If you go to NTPRS in the future, I can't recommend the immersion dinners enough.  Super fun night!!

Finding the Story with Jim Wooldridge aka Senor Wooly

Full disclosure: after last year's presentation in Dallas, I have a bit of a happily-married-woman crush on Senor Wooly.  So I decided to take a break from cramming information into my brain to geek out for a while and watch Senor Wooly talk.

Here are two things I grabbed from my second time seeing this presentation:

1. Use Subtext cards to give students a "secret" before any dialogue or acting.  For example: you have just found out that your partner has a third head, or You have decided that today is the day you are going to tell your partner that you love him/her.  This adds interest to an otherwise boring dialogue (what time is it?  What is the weather like?  Do you like cookies?  etc.)
2. Set up a police investigation where you grill two "partners" in crime who supposedly robbed a bank.  So you are asking questions like "Where were you at 2:00??"  "What is your friend's name?"  "What were you doing?" etc.

Anyway, that's just two things I took away from the session.  If I were a Spanish teacher, I'm sure I would have much more to add, but I just love Senor's story (and, as I said before, he's not too shabby to look at!)

Reading with Carol Gaab

I had a lot of fun in this meeting just messing with Carol...I tweeted a pic of her as my woman crush Wednesday (#wcw) and just laughed at how awesome she is.

I took a ton of notes!  Carol linked most things right back to the 5Cs of the national standards.

The first point that Carol made was to be as authentic as possible.  Speak with the same intonations as a native speaker.  Use the same hand gestures.  This fits under Comparisons as students start to notice the difference in your normal persona and the persona for the target language.  She also said that we must speak in a normal pace, but use pauses to allow students to catch up.  This way we are already training our kids to listen to the speed of native speech.  I really liked this idea because I know that I speak really slowly and my kids have a hard time making the leap to natural speech.

Carol uses 4 types of questions when checking comprehension for a story or a reading.  This really adds some interest and variety and NOVELTY to our circling and questioning.

1. Ask comprehension/pop-ups like we normally do
2. PQA: these don't have to be specifically about the students but could be about what interests them instead.  Either way, you are connecting to the students.
3. Cultural questions: what is the difference between what we just read and what we experience here?
4. Inference: Carol uses a wonderful thing called "Probable or Possible"  In this way, we are training kids how to infer, one of the main purposes of Common Core literacy strategies.

Using these 4 types of questions, we looked at the same reading for over an hour, and it was not even the least bit boring.  Could be just Carol's personality, but I can't wait to try this out in the classroom.

Carol suggests taking the text, breaking it into smaller pieces and putting those pieces on a PowerPoint (or something similar).  She then makes symbols for each type of question she is going to ask and then she puts those symbols in the presentation.  

During these presentations, she puts in a bunch of weird tangents, such as real-life facts (she managed to fit in facts about heart transplants and I can't remember the connection to the story, but it fit very well, culture (if the story was about a dog, she would give quick one-sentence facts about the Chihuahua, which gives the kids a cultural connection and a bit of non-fiction information), celebrities (if the reading is about family, she might show a picture of a well-known family and talk about it for a minute).  

I have a note and cannot remember exactly what the activity was, so if you were there and can help me (or if I read it in another blog, I will update this blog)...I have written down to give kids visuals and have them stand as you say their word and when they screw up, have them do it again so you get more reps.  Sounds pretty easy, but I don't have a visual/memory in my head of exactly what this looked like.

Carol spent the rest of the day talking about pre-reading activities.  First, she has kids make emotional connections and uses a character trait chart to decide which traits are probable or possible based on the title, the cover, and the summary of the book.  

I have another note that I remember, but I don't exactly remember when she uses it.  She has kids write down words in English on a Post-It that they need for a discussion, then they either put those on the board or she walks around as they are in partner work, writing the word in Spanish on the paper.  Very great for differentiation.  

Next, Carol showed us the Reading Action Chain: she took a quick 5-sentence story and projected it.  First, we talked about what we thought went first, then second.  Instead of picking a correct answer, the class discussed it to get more reps.  Once that had been discussed, she would hand out cards with each sentence while those students with a card took turns acting out that sentence and the rest of the class guessed which of the projected sentences it was.  This is just a ton of repetitions getting kids to say the sentences and READ them on the projection screen.  I think one of my biggest failures as a TPRS teacher in the past few years is that I have projected the whole story at a time.  I need to change my readings for next year to add NOVELTY.

The next pre-reading story we did (talking about pets) was to split into the 4 corners depending on what pet we would enjoy owning.  Once we had that, we discussed the answers and then added some inference questions.  Which group wants a pet that eats other pets?  Which group wants a pet that eats a lot?  Which pet eats the most?  Again, there were some heated discussions, especially about the last questions, but Carol never gave us the answer (in fact, she said that if the kids didn't drop the argument, she would assign as homework to find out the answer, such as "Which pet eats more: a dog or a snake).  

In discussions, Carol is always trying to insert indirect object pronouns naturally.  For example, if the reading is "Tarzan picked up Jane," she will say "So, Tarzan picked her up."  The kids don't have to think so much about what's going on because it's so comprehensible.  

Once the reading has been beaten to death with all of the tangents and PQA, etc, she adds her student actors and highlights adverbs.  How does he pick her up?  How does she answer?  As the students add these details, she types them into the reading.

Whew...we're still on pre-reading activities.  Carol took the text from chapter 1 and put it in a word cloud (wordle.net) to highlight what words were repeated the most and had kids come up with a one sentence summary for the chapter (Ours was Brandon wants a dog from Brandon Brown Wants a Dog) and a prediction for who the main character is.  She has a chart where they fill in these predictions and then re-visits them after they read chapter 1.  

Next, we talked about Comprehensible Input through Comprehension Illustrations.  Carol takes the illustrations from the chapters and the class discusses dialogue, plot, predictions, etc.  They repeat potential dialogue, changing to tone to see how they think the character said it.  (How does your mom say that?)

Once all of this is done, Carol pulls out five plot-driven sentences and we do the sequencing activity again, but this time with colored sentence strips (blank) and color-coded sentences.  Once the class has agreed on the sequencing, Carol has them write a sentence between each of those sentences to add details and fill out the story.

Next, she has students come up with a 6-word memoir for the main character, based on what they have predicted from the pre-reading activities.  For our example, I came up with "I'm a boy without a dog."  You could also take 6-word memoirs like that written by others and use them as a guessing game for the students to guess who would write that memoir.

To teach kids summarizing skills, you can summarize a few paragraphs and then have students match the summaries with the appropriate paragraphs.

We can talk about who said blank and to whom?  How did he/she say it?  We can sneak in the conditional and ask "Who would say....?"

Post reading, we can do Review Charades where the students still have the books and a student acts out a specific sentence from the reading.  Students have to guess the EXACT sentence that is being acted out.  

Carol does something called Freeze-Frame snapshots where she gives a group of 3 a sentence from the reading and they have 3 seconds (or so) to come up with a visual to go with that sentence before the camera clicks and the scene is finalized.

We can vote superlatives for the characters à la the Yearbook (Most likely to...)

And finally, Reader's Theater, which I explained in great detail last year in this blog post.

Whew!  I think that's all that I have in my notes.  That's why I LOVE a Carol Gaab session.  She has a million ideas to add NOVELTY to our classroom and keep kids on the edge of their seats.  Sorry for the long post, but there was too much good stuff to stop.

Tools for Thriving by Jason Fritze

I have heard Jason's name a lot as a dynamic presenter and wonderful guy, so I really didn't want to miss out on his session Tuesday afternoon.  And he WAS dynamic.  We were all on the edge of our seats to see what he would be doing next.  He had a TON of ideas and not a lot of time, so some of these tips aren't very well fleshed out, but I'm sure that if you contact him, he would share everything he has.  He's that kind of guy :)

So, the main things that I took from this session are some things that I need to make part of my routine.  First is to get noisemakers to call attention to myself when the kids are doing group or partner work.  I've tried the silent hand in the air while counting down, but it just seems like it takes too much time and it's not really my style.  I like the idea of noisemakers better (and Carol Gaab said that we should have a bunch of different ones so the kids don't start ignoring it).

He also used a lot of gestures.  I haven't been using gestures very much because I don't really like them, but they added a quick brain break and got the kids moving.  I think I'm going to start using them.  Jason told us that we were going to all show him "says" at the same time and then he watched us and picked the most creative one and then thanked the student who came up with that and had all of us thank that student also.  In this way, he is not saying no to anyone's idea...he just picks the best one.

He also broke the audience into two sides (Mexico and Spain) and would ask each side to do different things throughout the day.

These are all kind of muddled because Jason just talked so fast and was so energetic that my notes are all scrambled...sorry!

He showed us a backward planning template that he uses.  He starts with a text/story and looks at the new vocabulary.  He breaks the high frequency words into three columns: first, the words that can be TPRd, second, the words to put into TPRS or PQA, and third, the cognates or words that will be taught during the reading.  On the far right are the low frequency words, which are pretty much ignored (translated quickly during reading and then never talked about again).  I really need to get better about backward planning...maybe this year.

Finally, he showed us these shower curtain maps that he uses for TPR (land the plane on Paris.  Sit on the Atlantic Ocean, etc)  I'm not quite sure I'm going to do this, but I love the idea of having kids see the map and work with it.

The Event with Blaine and Von Ray

For some dumb reason, I did not bring a notebook to NTPRS this year, so I am scrambling to find paper and bits of blank space to take my notes....dumb me!

So Tuesday morning, I got to spend the day with two of my favorite people: Blaine and Von Ray.  They were working on how to create "an event" which used to be called a bird walk.  Basically, this is the way that you take a story and then go back in time to add details that were left out of the original story.  For example: the original story says that Betty was afraid of dogs, but doesn't go into much detail.  You can then take the characters back in time to dramatize what happened to make Betty afraid of dogs.

This was a great session because we got the chance to brainstorm ways to make an event given a particular story.  I didn't take many notes because there was a lot of chance to practice, and thus not a lot of concepts that were given.  Or rather, we were SHOWN how to do it instead of just given the information.  For whatever reason, I didn't take a lot of notes to share with you.

But here's the AHA...blow-your-mind moment of the day.  As we were coming back from lunch, Blaine was sitting there talking to us about how we have been successful and what our kids can do, etc.  I said that I hoped that Diana Noonan would sell her assessments at some point so that we could all prove what our kids can do.  And Blaine said that he had a super easy assessment that we can all use in our classrooms to prove proficiency because the questions are based on the TOP MOST COMMON VERBS in the Spanish language (and I'm going to assume that they are very similar in the French language).  Anyway, Blaine would really like for us to give this test to our kids to see how many are successful.  Here is the test (translate to your own TL):
Answer in a complete sentence:
1. Do you have a book?
2. Are you a girl or a boy?
3. What do you study?
4. Do you go to school?
5. Where are you?
6. Do you want any chocolate?
7. Do you like to speak TL?
8. What is there in your house?
9. What do you do when you are not in school?
10. Can you speak TL?

When you are grading this, you are only looking for subject and verb correctness (except for do you like to speak...then each part of that gets a half of a point).  Each correct verb is one point.  Blaine wants to see what percentage gets all correct and what % gets 9/10, etc.  So if you give this exam to your students...please send Blaine the results.

He said that he would assume that most TPRS students should be able to produce 80-90 words in a 5 minute free-write by the end of French 1 and that they should be graded on a 6 point scale.  1-2 is for consistent basic errors.  3-4 is mostly right (for verbs) and 5-6 is very few errors (maybe 1 error for every 10 words or less).  He says that in order to be graded, the student must have produced at least 50 words or the rubric is invalid.

So go!  Give this as a pre-test to your Fr 1 and 2 students and then give it again at the end of the year and keep track of the data!!

PDL with Michele Whaley

This session was the buzz of the conference the first day.  Michele was a little nervous, I think, to present this topic because it is so "out there" to her.  I didn't think it was that strange and really wish she had had three more hours to share ideas with us.

What in the heck is PDL?  I don't really know what it stands for because I didn't write it down.  Something about psychodramatic language or something like that.  Apparently, a guy in England runs 60 hour classes using this method of language teaching.  I don't quite know how it is used to TEACH language, but I think that it is great for practicing language, improving confidence, and inserting some novelty into the classroom.

In these classes, they start every day with relaxation.  In the beginning, every phrase is said in TL/English/TL, making a kind of sandwich.  Students close their eyes, get comfortable and take just a couple of minutes to get to a happy place.  Another teacher who has tried some of these methods says that she even sprays lemon oil in the classroom to help with the relaxation.

Once the relaxation is done, they do some sort of warm-up exercise.  These warm-ups are designed to help the student's muscles (particularly the mouth and tongue) get ready to speak the TL and for the ears to prepare to hear the TL.  In one such warm-up, Michele had us all stand in a circle looking at an imaginary object in the middle of the room.  Michele then talked to the object in Russian and we copied everything she said.  We tried to copy the pronunciation, the inflection, the gestures, etc.  We didn't have any idea what the heck we were saying, but that wasn't the purpose of the exercise.  At the end, she would ask if anyone had any questions.  You had to remember a specific word to ask what it meant...you couldn't just say "What were we saying?  What did that mean?"  You would have to say "What does nyet mean?  I heard you say that."  Then, she would give the translation and move on.

Another warm-up was called Echo through the mountains or something like that.  We were placed into 4 groups and she said a phrase to group 1, who repeated it pretty loudly.  Group 2 repeated a bit softer, group 3 softer than that, and group 4 in an almost whisper.  Again, we had no idea what we were saying, but that wasn't the purpose of this activity.

We spent the most time on a method that I think can really only be used with upper levels.  This method is called The Chairs.  Michele placed three chairs facing each other in the middle of the room.  We took turns giving possible scenarios where those three chairs would be like that: a Dr. office, marriage counseling, support group, etc.  Once we had a good list, we voted on which scenario we wanted to see.  Then, we placed students in those roles.  For our example, it was two parents trying to have "the talk" with their child.  The rest of the class was divided into three groups to be the support for that actor.  First, the teacher interviewed the three actors: What is your name?  Why are you here?  How do you feel?  Once that was completed, they were allowed to start.  AT ANY TIME, the support group could help feed the actors lines or creative ideas.  The actor could turn to the support group AT ANY TIME for help and the teacher was also there to fill in any essential vocabulary that the whole class was lacking.

That's the basic idea, but Michele said that her class did one of these Chairs activities for like 3 months (not exclusively, of course).  Once they had the discussion on one day, she would write up the dialogue and then they would read it.  She would change the actors the next day.  She would ask them to get in their support group and strategize points for the argument.  She would have the students choose a character and write a letter, article, blog, from that actor's point of view.  She would bring the characters back and flash forward to their lives 2 months from now.

In this case, the 3 chairs was the jumping off point.  She briefly told us that another idea would be to take famous paintings from the target culture and have students imagine themselves as the people in the paintings and start acting out what happened in the scene after what we see.

I am definitely going to start using this at least with my upper levels and I like the idea of prepping the muscles for speaking in the TL.  Could be a great primer for storytime to get them in the mood.