Next year

In the fall, my TPRS colleague and I were attacked at a curriculum meeting by the three high school teachers.  It was a really poorly-handled situation that could have been a compromise situation if the hs teacher didn't think that 1: they were right, 2:we were wrong, and 3: they had the authority to manage what we do in our classrooms.  I was so thankful for my colleague (only in her 2nd year of teaching) for speaking so eloquently and doing a phenomenal job of defending the theories and practices behind TPRS.  She is brilliant and I'm so glad to know her!  Anywho, in the spring, there was a job opening at a school ten minutes from my house, as opposed to my current job, which is 45 minutes away.  I was very conflicted about applying, but I figured that I would put it God's hands, and I filled out the application.  I struggled: "Do I want this job?  It's a high school, and I've heard that high schools are kind of lonely and departmentalized...  I would be teaching 5 preps?!  Oh no, I'll have to go back to school and get 8 more hours of grad credit?!  What's IB?  Etc..."  I talked to everyone about it.  My sister's boyfriend told me that I should do it for the growth experience.  My husband wanted me to work closer to home.  My colleagues, who knew the situation, said that I shouldn't have to deal with the hs crap.

And then this happened: the morning of my interview, I got an email from a friend who works at the hs.  She said that the hs French teachers were conducting a "research project" to compare the abilities of TPRS students vs. non-TPRS students and they found negative results for my students.  Not very surprising since the test that I'm assuming they used for their study is the French 2 pre-test that is multiple-choice, fill in the correct form of the verb, with no context or anything beyond grammar-babble.  So God came through and sent me a VERY clear message.  I went into that interview and rocked it!  Sure enough, I was offered the job.  Hooray for me!  Oh no, there was a problem...I was excited, but my rock-star colleague looked abandoned.  I tried to be excited, but I was so sad to be leaving her in a toxic situation by herself.  But wait! What's this?!  There's ANOTHER French position at my new district?!  She got that position and now we are both going to work in a TPRS-friendly district together!

It's been a bit overwhelming so far.  From the moment we were hired, we have been in on all the curriculum emails, meetings, etc.  We just finished a 40-hour (paid) week working with our other French colleagues to write curriculum for next year.  That was drinking from the fire hose, for sure.  But I feel so hopeful for the next year!  We will be able to collaborate once a week on our classes!  One of my new colleagues (who was also my cooperating teacher when I student-taught) is so encouraging!  Because of her, we are presenting at a conference in the fall.  It is so uplifting to hear positive responses to ideas instead of, "But how do you teach verbs charts?" in an accusatory manner.

I'm so excited!!

End-of-the-year Reflections

Another year under my belt.  I wonder if I will ever feel comfortable with what I've done...I hope not!  I want to keep improving and growing as a teacher.  This year I tried a lot of new things: Movie talk, embedded writing/reading, improv games, etc.  I still feel like I need to do a better job of circling to get my structures in there.  I'm getting better at recycling those structures in later stories, but I need to practice parallel stories and really focusing on the structures instead of the plot.  But MAN, we had some good stories this year.  This year, I did a better job of using actors.  I found some great students who were quiet in their seats, but sparkled in front of the class.  It was awesome to see.  This year, I got to see what a second year student can do after two years of TPRS study.  It was pretty cool, too.  My 4%ers were conjugating verbs like crazy and not even realizing what they were doing.  The lightbulbs were going off during pop-ups.  I even had a student start taking French 3 at the high school with a grammar queen and she was successful!  It was a good year...despite being attacked by the high school teachers.  More on that later....

Musings on second year

I think that, by the second year in the TPRS classroom, some students get really tired of the same old structure that I live by.  For those classes, I have tried to give them what they are begging me for in a couple of different ways.  First off, I do not do this every day because I am still the teacher and I know what's best for them...

I have started having them write the stories based on our target structures.  They have enough language that they are able to do this.  Then, I pick the best one and we go over it rather quickly the next day.  A lot of times, their stories are based on fairy tales or movies, so it makes it a lot more interesting for the students.

I also spend a lot more time on PQA than I do with my first years.  I don't know what it is about how I PQA, but I can't get the whole class to listen to me talk about one student in the class.  They just don't care that their neighbor woke up at 6 am.  Now, in the beginning of the year, when we are circling with balls, I can get the kids to pay attention for 45 minutes of me talking about one student.  But they just don't listen during a normal PQA.  Any thoughts on how I can spice it up?

My first Movie Talk!

I had about 10-15 minutes left in each of my French 1 classes today.  After hearing crickets with my first class as I tried to get them to tell me more about their weekends, I decided to try MT with my other 3 French 1 classes.  I used this video about a boy who kicks a can and the damage that causes (I think Laurie Clarcq first posted it).  We only made it through about 30 seconds of the video as I described the boy, we imagined what the pop in the can tasted like, we imagined what kind of music the boy listened to (because my class immediately labeled him as "emo"), etc.  We predicted what would happen next...  It was GREAT!  It was a nice break from storytelling for me because I had no control over what happened next in the video. 

I did start off by explaining that we were going to try something new and that we were going to watch a movie, but that I was going to stop the video very frequently to describe what was going on.  I promised that we would watch the whole thing without stopping once we were done with doing it my way. 

The kids seemed engaged and my superstar class was picking up the new vocabulary like nobody's business...which wasn't the point, but it was great to give those superstars something new to work with. 

I highly recommend trying this!

I have to update now that I've finished watching the movie with all of my classes:  My superstar class was able to re-tell the movie using super impressive vocabulary and my lowest class was at least engaged in the activity.  I can't wait to try it again soon...but not too soon because I don't want it to lose it's novelty!

My collaboration rock star

Two years ago, I was lucky enough to start working with a student teacher (she wasn't my student teacher...she belonged to my mentor).  She was so excited and eager to learn and eager to teach!  We hit it off right away...  Flash forward a month or two and she got hired to work with me in the district!  I convinced her to go to NTPRS with me in St. Louis and our love affair really began.  I have mentored her for the past year and half and I'm very excited to say that the student is now becoming the teacher!  We've had several snow days recently, and she's been working feverishly on curriculum FOR NEXT YEAR!  Now, I'm a real fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants gal, so I'm really excited to have someone to push me to thinking beyond tomorrow.

So this is what we are going to try to do for next year: 

1.  We are thinking of doing our stories only in the present tense, but still do our weekend talks in the past.  Here's the reasoning and please speak up if you have other ideas:  we will only be teaching level one and our students will go to a non-TPRS classroom for level 2.  The high school teachers don't care too much about how much of the past tense we cover (we're supposed to teach all of the passe compose, but it's always been shoved in at the last part of the year when other jr. high teachers taught out of the book), but they really want those verb endings...  I have really enjoyed telling stories in the past and reading in the present and my level twos are just now really getting into the difference between the two.  If I was able to follow my students beyond the first level, it would be a no-brainer.  Any thoughts or experience on this?

2.  We are going to look at the textbook and actually try to fit in all of the verbs that they are "supposed" to know.  And I know that they really don't know them beyond maybe being able to put an ending on them, but we'll see...

3.  I have gotten into the habit of having no idea where a story is going before I start telling it.  I think this might be a downfall because sometimes I don't know how to wrap up a story and so it just kind of ends up falling flat.  Sometimes it works out brilliantly and I have a home run story that I NEVER would have been able to create on my own, but then there are days when story time comes to an end and I feel like we haven't accomplished anything.  So I think we are going to go back to the table and try to come up with some really good story ideas to really get back to the essence of storyasking (where only the details are decided by the students).  Obviously, if a class has a home-run idea, we would have the flexibility to go with that.

4.  I would like to do more embedded readings with authentic texts

5.  We would like to infuse more culture into our stories and readings so that we don't have to have an English day to explain things like how the Acadians got to New Orleans or who St. Nicolas was.

6.  I really want to experiment with MovieTalk, but I'm not 100% comfortable with it not being 99% comprehensible to students.  It seems like so much fun, but I'm afraid that, even with the visual cues, it might be taking a step away from CI and into the land of Rosetta Stone where students are guessing the meanings of words.  Any thoughts?  (I am not trying to say anything bad about those superstars who are using this!  It sounds amazing, but I haven't done it or seen it done, so I'm a little hesitant...)

What else is working well in your classrooms?  We have not done Kindergarten Day or FVR.  The closest thing I've done to FVR is "Lisons Lundi!" which is where students work on a novel in groups.  When they finish one novel, they can choose another one to work through.

Stories this week

Today, we told this story in my French 1 class:

There was a girl.  Her name was Steve.  Steve wanted to go to Batman's party.  (we side-tracked a little and talked about "A mon avis, Spiderman est le meilleur hero..." and when I asked who was the best heroine, a superstar said "Joan of Arc" and had me laughing...AND I got to give a quick history lesson).  She wanted to go to Batman's party, so she went to Russia.  She danced the harlem shake to Russia (youtube harlem shake to get an idea of what this is.  Basically, one person dances mildly for the first 10-15 seconds of the music and then at a certain point, everyone goes crazy!  We played a clip of the 30 second song every time we repeated this sentence to add variety and interest).  In Russia, she looked for Batman's party, but she didn't find it.  She found Scotty's party (a kid in class).  Everyone in French class was invited to Scotty's party, but Steve wasn't invited.  So she went to Kazakstan.  In Kazakstan, she looked for Batman's party, but she didn't find it.  Robin was in Kazakstan and he looked at Steve romantically.  Steve looked at Robin romantically.  Robin  was invited to Batman's party, so he took her to the party with him. 

Gems from improv class

At my first NTPRS, I took a class with Von Ray about using the skills of improv to add excitement to your TPRS class.  Well, I was inspired, two years later, to start taking improv classes.  What a blast!  I am in love and will be performing for the first time on March 3rd.

The interesting thing to me is trying to take the "games" from the improv classroom to my TPRS classroom.  Here are some games that I think translate well.  They might be a little hard to picture without the visual, so feel free to ask questions if anything is not clear.

Patterns:  In this game, students stand in a circle.  I turn to the person to my left, look them directly in the eye, and we start a pattern by saying a word at the same time (this can be hard because the other person doesn't know what I'm going to say yet) and clapping.  Then, they turn to the person to their left and continue the pattern, and so on.  Once it gets back to me, we repeat the pattern until we can do it fairly quickly.  I would say that this works best if there is no more than 15 kids in a circle, so you might need to split up a larger class.  For my students, we start off with numbers.  I say "un" and my partner says "deux" and so on around the circle.  When it gets back to me, I turn to my left partner and say "un" again.  By this time, they should know that I am going to say "un".  Try and get it going faster and then start with the numbers a second time, so that there are two sets of counting going on at the same time.  Once kids get the hang of this, you can try a category, like colors.  I would start off with "bleu" and then my partner would say another color to his left-partner.  If you can get really good at it, you can have two categories going at once (colors and numbers).

Go!:  This is more of a brain-break, but it's kind of fun.  Again, stand in a circle.  One person points to another student and says their name (this would be good for the first weeks of school when we are trying to build community).  The person who has been called on looks at the pointer and says "Go!/Vas-y!"  The pointer can not move until the named person says Go!  Once they say Go, the pointer moves to take the named person's place and the named person becomes the pointer and picks another student.  It sounds really easy, but the brain's first reaction is to start moving as soon as the student names and points. 

Whatcha doing?:  I really like this game, but I have not yet tried it for the classroom.  Two students come to the front of the class and one student starts miming an action.  The other student says, Whatcha doing?/Qu'est-ce que tu fais?  The student doing the action says anything but what they are actually doing and the non-miming student starts mimicking that action.  For example, student A starts pretending to swim.  Student B asks "Whatcha doing?"  Student A says, "Riding a bike"  Student B starts pretending to ride a bike and Student A asks "Whatcha doing?" and student B says "playing football" and student A starts pretending to play football. 

Arm/leg/countdown:  This is one that I just thought of adapting yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to try it.  It would be great for those moments when the eyes are starting to get glassy.  Everyone stands up.  You shake your right arm and say "Arm, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8"  Then start shaking your left leg and say "Leg, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8"  Then move to the left arm and say "Arm, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8"  Then right leg "Leg, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8"  Then go back to the left arm and lose the 8 "Arm, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7"  Repeat until you are just yelling "Arm, leg, arm, leg, arm, leg" and jumping around like a goofball.  Obviously, you would translate to your language.

So that's it!  Hope these add some fun!