Saturday, May 17, 2014

Kindergarten Day with a Twist

About every other Friday I have "Kindergarten Day" with my groups.  I read a children's book while students sit on the floor and enjoy the story, just like Kindergarten students do.  I have them interact and participate in the process as I pause and ask them questions about the characters, or when I ask them to predict what will happen next.  I use regular children's books, or books from the Reading A-Z website. It is a paid subscription, and it is well worth it! There are books in English, French and also Spanish.  The great thing about it is that they adjust to your needs, and also are based on high frequency words! I am lucky to have a SMART board  and the Reading A-Z books have a "projectable" version that allows me to turn the page, hide text, color and/or write on the board if I want to.  Some of the books also have worksheets that are fun to use after the reading.  Before beginning the reading, I show them the cover of the book, and we try to develop as much background information about the character as possible.  This is a great review of things that they have learned, and will not be covered in the story.  It also takes them to the highest levels of the Bloom's Taxonomy, because they are applying and creating!  I write on the board what they come up with, such as name, description, family members, where does the character live (city, house/apartment, description of it etc.), hobbies, you name it! I help them by underlining words that can lead to more detail.  For example, if a student says: "she lives in a house", I underline "house", so that the next person sees that s/he can expand on that topic and add details to the house.
This time, I brought "Goyo el Pollo" (as I named it!) which is a toy that I just bought to play the "hot potato" game.  We used ten minutes to play it, and the student that "lost" had to give me background information on the character.  This was a great variation, as I saw students more engaged in the process.
After the game, I had a lot of information about the girl in the story:  family, parents' occupation, siblings, house, grandma was a millionaire because she played baseball with Felipe Alou, etc.
Then, I read the book, and did "circle"  the target structures.
After the book was read, I asked questions about the details of it, and also about the target structures to make sure they were acquired.  Then, we moved on to the worksheet.  The worksheet was very simple as it is truly for Kindergarten students, but still helped reinforced the target in a relaxed way that I realized worked as a great brain-break too!
We all had a lot of fun, learned a lot and closed our work week in a happy note.




Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Promoting Student Involvement & Creativity


One of my biggest challenges in the classroom is to find innovative ways to keep my students' interest and help them develop fluency.  TPRS has been one of my favorite tools to accomplish that, but sometimes it is difficult to engage students in the creation of stories. 
During my commute home last night, I heard on the radio about the "scandal" caused by a video from a security camera inside of a hotel's elevator in NY, where Beyonce's husband was "attacked" by his sister-in-law.  It is a three minute video that you can watch here.  Since it is a video from a security camera, there is no audio and now the media is going crazy speculating reasons why this happened.  So, I decided to do the same in class... let's speculate and figure out what happened!

1) I printed out pictures of the three famous characters, placed them in plastic sheet protectors and tied yarn to them, so that student-actors could "wear them".



2) In Spanish, through Comprehensible Input I told students that we were going to be "investigators" and find out the reasons why this woman was so mad at her brother-in-law, and why Beyonce didn't do a thing to defend him.
3) We watched and described the video in Spanish, Movie-Talk style. 
4) We selected student-actors to recreate the scene, (including the bodyguard) and we added dialogues.  It was a blast!
5) After the story was finished, they did a timed-writing, and also retold the story orally using their own drawings.

I adjusted the same plan for all my levels, with Spanish I being simpler, and my Spanish 4/5 more complex.  With the higher level we talked about what they "had done" and ended up with something like:  They had danced a lot, had sung a lot, and had drunk a lot of milk.  All of them, except for Solange (Beyonce's sister) had eaten something, but she hadn't... that is why she was in a very bad mood, OBVIOUSLY! :)  In the elevator, she told Jay Z that his music was very bad, and he responded that he had hit her puppy.  Then she tried to hit him, while the bodyguard tried to stop her and JZ yelled "protect me!".  Students decided that Beyonce was sleeping in the elevator, and didn't notice a thing. 
I over-heard students as they walked out, saying that this had been the "must fun story this year!".  What made it so fun?  We do these kind of stories all the time!  It must be the so called "connection to the real-world"... they can discuss something that actually happened.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Another Approach to Clarify Preterite and Imperfect

Every year when my students ask "When do you use CAMINÓ instead of CAMINABA?" I feel overwhelmed (and a bit scared!) because I know that I don't have a way out, and I have to explain when to use preterite and imperfect.  Teaching through Comprehensible Input implies avoiding grammar rules and memorization, as we are trying to use words in context knowing that eventually students will "get it".
This year, in my attempt to find a quick solution that will satisfy the need of an answer without making it a long lecture and a list of rules to memorize, I used the picture below from "Where's Waldo?"

I explained that the decision to use preterite or imperfect is based on the intention and the perspective that we have in our messages.  I had them look at the picture on my SMART board, and look at all the different situations in it.  For example, let's look at the bottom of the picture, left corner.  If my intention and the main event is to say that a woman took a picture of her husband (preterite= what "happened") while three women were flirting  (imperfect=what "was happening") with a muscular guy, I say "la mujer tomó una foto de su esposo mientras tres mujeres coqueteaban con un hombre musculoso".
The imperfect is the "background" of the picture that we want to paint for our listener/reader, so that s/he has a bigger idea of what happened.  If my intention, or the "main" event that I want to tell is that three women flirted with a guy, and a woman was taking pictures of her husband is the background (not the main event of my message), I switch perspective:  "Las tres mujeres coquetearon con el hombre mientras la mujer tomaba una foto de su esposo." I had some volunteers do this in English.  They looked at one specific situation and chose it as their "main event, or reason for the message".  Then, tell the class what event was that, and describe what was happening around it. There were a lot of expressions such as "ahhh" and that made me happy!
I don't know if this helps you, but certainly my students said that this exercise clarified this subject for them. Do you have any ideas to facilitate comprehension of this topic?