Shifting in Spanish 1

I am teaching two classes of Spanish 1 this semester. I don't usually teach Spanish 1, but I decided to teach it because I wanted to start from the beginning with a TCI/TPRS approach (read: not following the textbook order) and try to teach 90% in the TL. We are about a month in and my students are doing fantastically! I am speaking probably 75-90% Spanish during the 82 minute periods and students are engaged and learning.

What I am doing is nothing new and most of the ideas I have taken from other #langchat people (especially Elena López and Amy Zimmer), but I thought I would share in case anyone can use any of these free ideas and/or resources!

Here are some of the things that I am doing during this first month of school:

• Preguntas diarias - Everyday, we start with these questions. These are basic questions that would be taught over a few weeks, but we have been trickling them in along the way. We are four weeks in and now I am having a student be the líder and he/she asks the questions. The slideshow and images help.

                     

• Canción y artista de la semana - Each week on Monday, I introduce a new song and the artist. Everyday we start class by singing (or trying to sing or just following along and reading the lyrics as the song plays). I am creating slideshows for each song (find them here). The slideshows include basic information about the band/singer. This is a great way to trickle in some basic questions and answers. Here is an example for the song "Azul" and the singer Natalia Lafourcade:

                      

• Cuentos - I am basically using Elena López and Amy Zimmer resources. They have shared sooo many things with me. They are very generous and so willing to share! If you are interested in teaching with a TCI/TPRS approach, I recommend taking some time to explore their resources! So far, we have done three stories, so far: "El pez dorado y el gato gris," "Buenas noches gorila,"and "Oso pardo" (see below). We are starting the fourth story, "El gato bilingue" on Monday. The goals for the first unit are: 
• I can comprehend a story in Spanish.
• I can retell a story in Spanish with visual prompts.
• I can create my own story using high frequency vocabulary that I have learned.
• I can function in a "solo español" classroom.

• Below are the four stories for the first month of school. I decided to use "El pez dorado y el gato gris" as the first unit and "Buenas noches gorila," "Oso pardo," and "El gato bilingüe"as the second unit. Again this is all the hard work and generosity of Elena López and Amy Zimmer:

                    

                     

                    

                    

• A few observations:
• We do a lot of repeating, acting words out, listening, responding chorally, and drawing. (Nothing new, I know.) The culture of the class is that everyone does it. This is my participation rubric.
• Two of the stories we have done so far are children's books. I wasn't sure how students would respond and I wondered if they would think it too childish, but they have really enjoyed them, maybe because they are familiar and a bit comforting. 
• I am going slow, but all students are acquiring the language. It makes me think of Skip Crosby's FLAME TOY acceptance speech and how we need to teach to all students. My Spanish 1 students had some Spanish in middle school, but were not successful enough to take Spanish 1 in the 8th grade, so these would be some of the students that Skip refers to.
• I am teaching "structures" instead of teaching grammar and isolated words. Students are learning definite articles and indefinite articles without me even mentioning those grammatical terms (and seeing students' eyes glaze over as they mentally fade away).
• Students have learned adjective agreement and placement without giving them notes on it.
• Student are acquiring high frequency vocabulary. They know hay, tiene, dice, es, está. In the past, for some reason, students in Spanish 2 never knew the verb decir!
• Eventually I will have to explain them difference between ser and estar, but it will be easier because we are using es and está frequently, so students will have a base to understand it.
• Assessments - they are basic and will probably evolve a lot, but here are some examples:
• Quiz #1 "El pez dorado y el gato gris"
• Quiz #2 "El pez dorado y el gato gris"
• Test for "El pez dorado y el gato gris"
• Quiz for "Buenas noches gorila"
• Outline of test and practice writing
• Test for "Buenas noches gorila," "Oso pardo," and "El gato bilingüe (ask for permission to view & I will share it with you)
• Memrise (another Amy Zimmer suggestion) has been great to learn words before we get in to the stories. See example here.
• Textivate is a wonderful resource! Here are some of Elena's creations for El gato bilingüe here and here. 
• Another resource that we will be using is Sr. Wooly's NEW site. We are beta testing it and it will be interesting to see how students acquire the language using that! One function that I really like is the listening activities that students have to do for some of the "nuggets".

My plan is to continue with the stories and incorporate some of the typical Spanish 1 topics (house, family, food).  I am also sure that with Elena and Amy's resources, I will teach plenty of "grammar," but in the context of high frequency vocabulary. I hope to share student examples of work here as well!

Using "Alma" to introduce the past tenses

This post may seem somewhat obvious to many, but this is the first time I have taught (more introduced) the preterite and the imperfect this way. I am continuing to use resources and ideas from Elena López (she shares SO MANY amazing resources to use cortometrajes) and Martina Bex as I change what I do in Spanish 2 (see last post) and it has been going well, mainly because there is a lot more Spanish being spoken by me and the students as the focus has been more on communicating and less on conjugating.

I still do have to teach certain vocabulary that is tied to the textbook, but I am now putting that "on the side" and focusing on communication and lots of CI through reading and listening. My main resources for the past month have been cortometrajes. The current one that I am using to introduce is one that many Spanish teachers use (see Cynthia Hitz's blog with lots of links to other resources). So, although there are tons of fantastic resources out there to use with this, I am going to share some more :)

This is the Essential Question for the unit: How do I describe events in the past, including what happened in the cortometraje "Alma" and doing errands downtown (Realidades 3A vocab that I have to teach)? The slideshow below is the main resource for the first part of the unit. (Thanks to Elena López for the screenshots and the idea - my version is a simplified version of hers. Her version is in the present tense):

To start this unit, I emphasized that we will be learning the preterite tense and that the verbs will have different endings. But, instead of giving them the endings to start (and conjugating 20 verbs out of context), we started with the words on slide 2. Before students see the cortometraje, we go through the slideshow and I tell the story. The "Target Structures" are on the board and in their notebooks so that they can reference them. I ask a lot of questions and students answer. There are also questions throughout the slideshow that students will answer. After we have gone through part of the slideshow, we watched that part of the cortometraje. I love using the cortometrajes this way! The students are very engaged and they are getting tons of CI with lots of past tense verbs.

We have done many different activities, including:

• Put the story in order (see this doc)
• Read aloud with a partner and translate
• Read, summarize and draw (see this doc)
• A textivate activity with a simplified summary - click here
• Another textivate activity with quesitons (the same ones on the assessment) - click here
• Quizlet 

After the first day, I formally introduced the preterite with Martina Bex's -ar preterite packet and this catchy song from the Realidades text. We have also used her -er/-ir preterite note packet. And we will be using her irregular preterite packet. This has been the smoothest introduction of the preterite that I have ever done! It makes so much sense to just start using the preterite (along with some imperfect too!).

Here is the evaluación that students will do.

Students are engaged and they are communicating using the past tenses! I still have to teach the vocabulary from chapter 3A of Realidades - here is the Quizlet link.

I am hoping to use the cortometraje "Runaway" next week. My student aid made the slideshow below:

New Spanish 2

I have been teaching my Cultura y Civilización course now for five years and I mostly share what I do in there on this blog. When I first started that course, it was a major paradigm shift for me. I was teaching culture and content in a communicative way, instead of vocabulary list, quiz, grammar, quiz, review, test. I have developed that course to now have 14 different units that rotate so that some students can repeat the course as "part 2". I am very proud of what I do in that class and I love teaching it.

During the last five years, I have also taught Spanish 2 and 3. I have made some changes in those classes like using more authentic resources, doing speaking assessments,  and reading 2 TPRS novels in each class during the course of the semester, and that has helped me to be able to teach in a more CI way with a higher percentage of TL being spoken by me and students. But, those courses are still heavily based on a textbook, with chapters with long lists of vocabulary, specific grammar points, fill in the blank activities, and much more English than there should be.

I have been reading the book Languages and Learners: Making the Match  (highly recommended), by Helena Curtain and Carol Ann A. Dahlberg, and it is validating everything that I think I should be doing, but haven't been doing completely. Reading that book, along with attending CSCTFL and seeing some powerful student examples of what they do with the language, pushed me to (finally) drastically change what I am doing in my Spanish 2 classroom. (Note: I am only two weeks in to this change.)

I am still teaching the same content (clothing, reflexives, past tense, etc.), but in a different way. One of my biggest goals is to stay in the Target Language for 90% of the class - me and the students. My other goal is to change the evaluaciones that I use; so the ones I have created are more communicative. In order to that, I realized that I cannot continue to teach with a vocab/grammar/textbook focus.

So, where to start? I decided to start with some Martina Bex units. I am very thankful to her because she gave me some ideas about where to start. The first unit I did was Ladrones unit (script here and entire unit on Teachers Pay Teachers). I really liked the unit, but some students found the story to be a bit silly (they are 10th graders), so we adjusted it a little bit. Martina's other resources for this unit were excellent.

I have compiled some of Martina's resources for the unit here and this slideshow has my preguntas esenciales, the evaluaciones, and part of the unit (the part that Martina shares freely on her site). There is also a rubric so that students know what is expected of them as far as speaking Spanish in the classroom is concerned.

We spent about 7 days (80 minute classes) on this unit, including the day of the evaluaciones. My students (a non-honors class at the end of the day) were excellent! I think they see the validity in this approach (even if it is difficult at times).

My next unit is called, "Mi Rutina Diaria." I have compiled the preguntas esenciales, resources and evaluaciones here.

Below is the first part of the unit. I am going to do three "segments" of this unit with three cortometrajes - Alarma, Destino and El Monstruo en el Armario (very engaging - thanks Elena López) and then explain how reflexive verbs conjugate (using Martina's notes). **Note** I edited the cortometraje below because the real ending has a gun and I wasn't quite comfortable with that. Students could definitely relate to this guy (who has a hard time waking up).

Below are the evaluaciones for the unit. By focusing on these evaluaciones, I am focusing on having students talk a lot and stay in the Target Language.

• Evaluación hablada (weekly quiz grade): Speaking "solo español" in class.
• Evaluación escrita y hablada (quiz grade): Write a short description of what happens in the video "Alarma". Use the Target Structures. Draw some illustrations and use them to tell what happens in the video.
• Evaluación escrita y hablada (quiz grade): Write a short description of what happens in the video "El Monstruo del Armario". Use the Target Structures. Draw some illustrations and use them to tell what happens in the video.
• Examen (en tres partes):
• Evalución de leer y escribir: Read about someone's morning routine and compare and contrast yours to his/hers. This is from the Martina Bex Packet.
• Evaluación de hablar: Describe your morning routine. Describe 5-8 things that you do each morning before you come to school
• Evaluación de escuchar: Watch some commercials, understand the basic message of each one, describe what the people are doing in the commercials, and read sentences about the commercials and identify which sentence goes with which commercial.

Big thanks to Elena López , Cynthia Hitz and Martina Bex (and probably other people too) for the inspiration and help with putting this all together.

I should also mention that Martina's unit packets are very helpful because she explains her methods and how to teach with TPRS, in addition to giving great resources.

My goal is use Bianca Nieves y los siete toritos (from TPRS Publishing by Carrie Toth) with this group for the last 3 weeks of the school year. I think they will be ready by then and it will be wonderful to just focus on the book, instead of having it "on the side."