Reading Tumba with 5th Grade

Tumba, by Mira Canion, is the first ever TPRS novel I've used as a FLES teacher. I am reading it with my 5th grade classes. Up till now, we've built stories and I've typed them up and we've read those, but we've never read a published novel. So I decided to try Mira Canion's new novel Tumba, starting in the first week of October as we lead up to the Day of the Dead. The classroom set of Tumba books has been sitting on a table just inside the door to my classroom for a few weeks. Everyone who walks in and out pauses to peruse the colorful cover with its creepy skeleton and marigold-bedecked tomb. But when I announced to my 5th graders that we were actually going to read it, they were stunned. "In Spanish?" they asked in disbelief. "Well, yeah," I responded. "But how will we understand it?" they moaned in despair. "You'll understand it." I assured them. They did not look convinced.

When we cracked the covers last week, it was one of the most exciting classes I've ever had. Mind you, these are students who have been exposed to Spanish twice a week for 30-40 minutes, some of them since Kindergarten, and some even less. Three of them were new students who had had no Spanish at all. As I read the first paragraph aloud to them and they followed along in their books, I could see them one by one glancing up at me in joyful amazement. "I understand this!" they were telling me, either out loud or with their eyes. We translated, we looked for cognates, we continued. They read with a partner and reported back what they had understood. I did a couple of grammar pop-ups. (How can you tell Alex is a boy and not a girl? because he's "nervioso" not "nerviosa" one or two students noted with confidence). "Oh yeah," the others concurred. We've started using journals to recap what's happened in each section we read (in English, for now, but I think we can do it in Spanish before long), list cognates and 'nuevas palabras'. When we broke out the journals this week, one student cried out "Oh yay, we get to draw!" I hadn't even thought of that in connection with this novel, but it would be fun to do that too.

So yeah, I definitely recommend Mira's novice novels. Having worked with her this past summer to translate Agentes secretos from Spanish to French, I have tremendous appreciation for what goes into making a novel comprehensible to the most novice of novices. Mira kept saying, "I want students to be able to read this in their first month of learning French." What might seem boring and repetitive to a native speaker or seasoned upper level teacher is not at all boring to a novice, especially when the content is as compelling and fun as Mira's novels. What I'm seeing in my 5th graders is sheer joy of reading something they are excited about, which is accessible enough for them to forge forward to see what happens next. In the language of my elementary school reading teacher colleagues, they are reading at the "just right level".

My challenge is to keep myself from making it too much of a chore by going all teacherly on them. I need to harness their enthusiasm, while still making sure everyone is understanding and no one is left behind. I need to make opportunities for circling and PQA without losing the momentum of the story. Suggestions and guidance are most welcome. I'm a total newbie at this approach to the 'R' of TPRS, but I am loving it. I'm looking forward to some of the ACTFL sessions on reading, in hopes there will be some FLES-appropriate tips there too. And I can't wait to dive into the many other novice novels I have on my shelves with even younger students. Any recommendations for 3rd or 4th grade?

Alaskan TPRS Magic - Michele Whaley

I first saw this session listed in the program and thought-- TPRS in Alaska? What can that have to do with me? Then I read further and realized that what Michele would be describing was exactly what I am looking for: how to expose more colleagues to comprehensible input strategies, get them excited about learning and practicing, and thereby create a network of practitioners to work with.

Michele Whaley teaches Russian in Anchorage, AK. She shares her Prezi of the session here.

Michele and a couple of TPRS colleagues recognized that TPRS teachers (perhaps all good teachers...?) need continuous access to observation and coaching in order to learn and grow. Having more TPRS teachers in the district would help make that possible. The Anchorage school district has 8 high schools, 16 middle schools, and 45 elementary schools. Over the course of 3 years, Michele helped 100 Alaskan language teachers gain access to TPRS meetings, classes, webinars and conferences. Starting with a tentative group of 5 teachers, they have grown to a core group of 25 language teachers who meet and contribute regularly to discussions about teaching with TPRS.

Michele shared these very helpful Nuts and Bolts of getting people together to learn:

Set up meetings

Send two notices (to every language teacher you can think of)

Send follow-ups with additional info

Provide food!

Keep getting training

In the Alaskan Miracle, many national experts were willing to Skype into meetings: Corinne Bourne at AFLA, Ben Slavic, Susie Gross, Laurie Clarcq, Scott Benedict webinars, Jamie Kroll from NC, Terry Waltz, Katya Paukova. Participants clustered around computer monitors and cameras and soaked it all in. I think they even had participants Skype in to the Skype sessions, so they were communicating screen to screen.

Katya (a seasoned TPRS presenter and Russian teacher) taught a Russian class to parents, getting them excited about TPRS and seeing how their children could be learning. Susie Gross went with Michele on their annual exchange to Russia. Many Russian (nationality) language teachers are interested in learning TPRS when they see the results.

Michele arranged for teachers to receive university credit for time spent in training and development:

3-credit class: required readings, attendance, etc.; 1/3 credit for evidence of collaboration; increased conference attendance; on-line presence; very visible at AFLA

Three important elements for success:

COACHING

COLLABORATION

OBSERVATION

As many of us have discovered, it's not enough to go to one workshop and come home fired up and ready to roll. You get through one or two lessons and find yourself saying "What now?" You need to be able to brainstorm with another TPRSer, get coaching form a more experienced teacher, and observe and be observed (see Susie Gross's wonderful Observation Checklist).

In order to be able to do these essential collaboration activities, Alaska teachers received a grant to pay for subs so teachers can observe each other.

My biggest take-away from the session was Michele's observation that Outsiders work best as gurus in the beginning. I have discovered first hand that colleagues don't necessarily respond to ideas for change from one of their own. If an outside expert can get the group charged up, then the group can find its own power to move forward.

Hmm... I already have plans underway for a workshop in August to share TCI strategies with colleagues from my (independent PK-12) school and from area schools. If Michele's observation is correct, the workshop will have more of an impact on visiting teachers than on my own school-mates. We'll see...

Writing Novels for Emerging L2 readers - Kristy Placido

So you want to be an author...?

Kristy Placido is the author of several novels and advanced-level curricula for TPRS Publishing, Inc. She teaches HS Spanish in MI. Handout.

Novels are a great vehicle for compelling, comprehensible, cultural input. They are a mainstay of the Blaine Ray curriculum, providing a culminating experience for language students as well as an added source of comprehensible input that can be accessed outside of class time. Novels authored expressly for teaching proficiency through reading and story-telling are a key stepping stone on the way to reading authentic literature in the target language.

How to get started?

Choose a geographic setting: Google a country you're interested in using as the setting. Look at people's travel blogs. Read Lonely Planet.

Find existing stories: Cuentos de la Alhambra--Washington Irving, in public domain, can be reworked.

News stories—Chilean miners, mudslides, soccer, watch Univision, etc. for ideas.

Visit websites for charitable organizations, find stories, descriptions of people, places, activities they help with.

Travel/history/culture books

A writer is currently basing a novel on an adoption story.

If you start with a plot idea, look for an appropriate setting to develop your plotline.

If you start with your characters, develop each character before you write the story, think about actual people you know, get to know your characters deeply.

If your story is setting-driven, think about: culture, history, landscape, places of interest, experiences, parks, palaces, homes.

Google plot development for lots of websites that can provide guidance, such as: http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/read/plot1.html

Outline the story, then begin developing each chapter. Include descriptions of people and places.

Create level-appropriate reading:

Limit new vocabulary (8-20 new words per chapter; 10-15 chapters)

Use tons of cognates, known vocab, appropriate numbers of repetitions: Rule of thumb: minimum 5-7 reps for each new word introduced, preferably within the same chapter. Otherwise, footnote.

Use dialogue to allow for different verb forms.

Ask students for feedback on drafts of your chapters.

Make sure to keep some conflict or suspense for the end of the book. Think carefully about how you will reveal the details or unfold events.

Don't be afraid to scrap ideas and rewrite.

Talk with people you trust about your ideas. Have a native speaker read for correctness and fluency. (Nelly Hughes, Ohio (mexicana) is interested in helping with culture-based stories.)

Before sharing your work, make sure you copyright it: Copyright (c) 2011 Your Name. All rights reserved.

When you are ready to publish, send manuscript to: TPRSPublishing, BlaineRayTPRS, Contee Seeley Command Performance, Self publish: Lulu, Amazon: CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing, etc.

Write every day. Don't put off writing until you have fully formed ideas. Flesh out ideas even if they don't turn into anything.

El Nuevo Houdini: Two in one—present and past.

To see novels for younger learners, check out Karen Rowan series: Isabela, Congo

Comprehension Checks with Leslie Davison & Barb Cartford

Leslie Davison is a K-5 Spanish teacher in a dual immersion school in Colorado. Barb Cartford teaches Spanish and Swedish in Minnesota, and does an amazing Lisbeth Salander impersonation (but that was last year...). Handout.

Leslie spoke about the importance of distinguishing immersion from submersion : we want our students to hear the target language, but we don't want them to drown in it! To make sure they are keeping their heads above water, we need to develop ways to check for comprehension. These may range from quick translation checks: What did I just say?* to a variety of subtler student feedback checks:

One-word quick check: El gato fue al cine--What does "fue" mean?*

Ask students to respond to statements in the TL with "Ahhh!" if they understand or a time-out signal (such as raised hand, T-hands, hand swooping overhead--"That went right by me!"--or fist in palm, e.g.) if they don't. Often it's the abler students who use this strategy most-- they know what they don't know more readily than slower processors. How do we serve the slower processors?

Do a quick poll of students, asking them to close their eyes and raise both hands using 1-10 fingers to show how well they understand. The teacher can see who is feeling less than 8 and focus on raising comprehension for those 'barometer students'. In older classes, students can be polled using their cell phones and texting to the website www.polleverywhere.com.

When reading a text, students can show full comprehension by translating into English, then discussing in the TL.

*Teachers wanting to use as much of the target language as possible teach their students early on how to say and understand comprehension check language such as "What did I just say?" and "Show me with 1-10 figures how much you understand.")

At the end of class, give a quick 5-question, 5-Point quiz.

Yes/no

Name

Place

When

Solution

Practice numbers by asking who got more than 80%; aim for 100%.

Barb Cartford did a fun Swedish lesson, practicing some of the comprehension checks we had heard about. She used the story of the Bilingual Mouse, based on a Cuban folktale in which a mother mouse saves her mouse children from a threatening cat by barking at the cat in Dog language, the lesson being: "It pays to be bilingual."

Vocab needed to tell and understand the story:

yes/no

and/or

there is

comes from

is a cat

not

says

eats cheese

is scared

plays baseball

walks

runs

Later in the conference I talked to a teacher who has students teach their parents this vocabulary as homework during the weeks before Parents' Night, then the teacher tells the Bilingual Mouse story to parents on Parents' Night so they can experience the wonders of TPRS! I may try it this year.

If Mme Hayles can do it...

I'm inspired by a teacher I met last week at the National TPRS conference in St Louis-- Bess Hayles, who keeps a great blog of her experiences as a TPRS teacher. I've been following her since last year, and her blog inspired me to start mine, though I've been ve-e-e-ry slow to get into the routine of posting. OK, so I haven't really developed any routine of posting. Mme Hayles is now posting a session by session account of her week at NTPRS, so I think I'll do the same here, just to get me back on blogging track. Feel free to compare and contrast.

Making plans

I've been granted a 3-month sabbatical by my school to visit TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) practitioners and users of other methodologies which differentiate instruction to better serve all learners; study schools with successfully articulated K-12 language programs; and share ideas with educators thinking about the place of language acquisition in 21st century education.

Three snow days and a long weekend in early February gave me the chance to research my options, talk to teachers and administrators in other schools, and start to plan my itinerary. I have four major trips scheduled so far:

1) In early March: A family vacation to Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, to visit my nephew and his partner who teach at the Island School. While the IS does not offer language instruction, it does offer an exciting place-based curriculum, using island and marine ecology as the basis for study of math, literature, art and science. I'm hoping to get inspiration for my gardening-based Spanish curriculum at Westtown. (As a side benefit, all of my family will complete our open water SCUBA certification!)

2) In late March: a New England road trip to Glastonbury School District in CT, to experience their exemplary K-12 language curriculum which uses a set of cross-disciplinary essential questions to guide instruction at each level; and St Johnsbury Academy in VT, a semi-private high school where the language department has embraced TPRS as a key tool for language instruction.

3) In late April/early May: a western trip to San Francisco, where I'll visit the Tamalpais high schools which use TPRS district-wide; and return via Denver, with 3 days seeing various languages taught at various levels K-12 in the Denver Public Schools, using a variety of TCI (Teaching with Comprehensible Input) methods.

4) In mid-May: a Midwestern road trip to Canton, MI to see a friend who teaches upper level Spanish using TPRS at Salem High School, near Detroit; Cincinnati, OH to visit the K-12 language program at Summit Country Day School, where use of TPRS is just part of a school-wide focus on developing global competence; and Pittsburgh, PA to learn about the K-12 program at Sewickley Academy and see how they have succeeded in integrating a Global Studies program into their K-12 curriculum.

Between long-distance visits, I hope to sit in on classes with colleagues at local schools, work in my garden, and reflect on what I learn through entries in this blog.

Please check in from time to time and feel free to comment, challenge or share.

Getting started

Two one-day TPRS workshops, one four-day FluencyFast class in Arabic, and two week-long NTPRS conferences--I'm feeling like an advanced beginner at TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), gradually building my repertoire for 3+ years. And I find it the most fun and exciting and creative and effective way I've ever taught language, at any level. I'm the only language teacher in my division (K-5) and the only TPRS user at my PK-12 school, so am hoping to connect with others through this blog and other online networking opportunities.

This is a start. More to come.