Week Two

I survived two full weeks of school.  Probably mostly on fumes.  My 1st year students are still working through my modified version of Circling with Balls (CWB).  Each student has made a name tent that shows their name and something they play (basketball, guitar, etc.).   We spend about 10-15 minutes each day talking about people.  After two weeks, I have about 8 kids left.  I've read on Ben Slavic's web site that he is able to do this the whole hour sometimes, but I'm definitely not there yet.  I stumble and the kids look bored.  We move on.

After the modified CWB, we've been doing TPR.  I'm focusing only on a handful of expressions right now.  My expressions are:

• Hold your arm/hand up.  
• Put your arm/hand down.
• Stand up.
• Sit down.
• Turn around.
• Open the...
• Close the...
• Look at the...
• Go.

I can only do TPR for another 10 minutes or so. Again, I have heard people say that they can do this for MUCH longer.  My room is crowded.  My students get agitated, and I am not good enough at this to push it.  I used a tic-tac-toe model from TPRS in the Classroom by Alison DeHart and Gloria Simpson to review commands.  Students partnered up and made a tic-tac-toe board.  They numbered each square.  I handed out slips of paper with commands written on them. In order to play in a square, your partner read that number from his sheet of paper, and you had to act out the command.  Kids really liked this!

We've spent time learning our ABCs.  This takes no more than 5 minutes.  We practice with partners, we sing the song.  Sometimes I say and they repeat, other times not. We played ABC bingo.  

We've spent time learning a children's counting rhyme.  Same routine as with the ABCs (minus bingo).

      Eins, Zwei, Polizei

      Drei, Vier, Offizier

      Fünf, Sechs, alte Hex'

      Sieben, Acht, Gute Nacht

      Neun, Zehn, Auf Wiederseh'n.

I find that my advanced classes (levels 2-4) are a bit more difficult . My level 2, particularly, is resisting the storytelling structure.  I tried to do the modified CWB with them, because they do not all know one another; however, they glazed over way too fast. So I started doing stories with them, but I am forcing it.  I did the Katzengeschichte (chapter 1 from Blaine Ray, Look I can Talk!).  I went too fast. But, like everyone says, I felt like it was s-l-o-w.  Students weren't being creative.  I was exhausted and confused.  They were even more confused.  Now I am procrastinating starting the next story! How awful it could be... how forced... do I have the energy!?

My combined 3/4 class likes stories better.  They get too carried away though.  They want the boy to be looking for cats in Mordor with hobbits (add detail, upon detail, upon detail) and before I know it, they're distracted thinking about all of that and NOT German.  I have to keep reigning them in. They did GREAT with the reading though.  

So here I am.  Almost completely through with two weeks, and, to be completely honest, a pretty big part of me wants to run back to my textbook and apologize to it profusely.  Maybe I should just take the repetition element from TPRS and apply it to my book. Can I quit that easily? Would it be easier? YES.  Is it better? I HAVE NO IDEA.  I would definitely have an easier time lesson planning (Welcome back unending hours of planning and prep for a mediocre lesson... I haven't seen you since student-teaching!).  I could follow the structures/order that I already know.  But I gave out a classroom expectations that said we'd use storytelling.  I told my classes we wouldn't have a textbook.  I'm sure so many other new-to-TPRS teachers have had all of these thoughts.  I know I need to give it more than two weeks; obviously, there is a transition period and learning curve.  

The real question, I guess, has to be:  

What is going to be best for my students? 

 

Today, I just don't know.

Willkommen!

Last spring, I enrolled in an Action Research course to further my master's degree. For my project, I decided to research TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling).  I read articles and on-line explanations of Blaine Ray's holistic approach to teaching language, watched teacher demonstrations of TPRS classrooms, and faked my way through half of a unit using TPRS.  

I was exhausted.  

My results did not scream, "HEY! THIS WORKS!"  But I knew.  I knew in a sure-the-numbers-aren't-great-but-you-can-never-change-my-mind sort of way that TPRS was valuable.  So, I did what any good teacher would do: I signed up for a TPRS summer workshop.  My presenter was fantastic.  I was invigorated and vowed to throw the textbook out the window of my second floor classroom (figuratively, of course).  Lucky for me, I was allowed to purchase Blaine Ray's books to guide my instruction and have the freedom to use them.  
The summer passed, and I was convinced that this year would be a fantastic, successful TPRS year.  I continued reading articles, watching videos, finding all of the TPRS blogs that I could find, and signing up for just about every listserv that exists on the topic.  
And then the first day of school happened.

Gulp.

Even after everything that I read and watched, I was not prepared to start a year off using TPRS.  The experts say, "Your students aren't ready for stories right away." "TPR for a while." "I don't start stories until my students know 100-150 words."  

My classes didn't bomb.  Far from it the first week, really. I overplanned every single day.  We had fun.  We learned things like "Wie heißt du?" and "ich heiße," and "er/sie heißt" (what's your name/my name is/his or her name is) more quickly than before because I used German to learn those things instead of English.  But I was exhausted. And I wasn't using 90% target language.  I was using more than I had in the past but not enough.  And the TPR got boring.
So I read blogs and listservs.  I spent all of my time reading Ben Slavic's web site and online PLC or Susan Gross's lessons and resources.  But even though they both said things like, "Don't use stories right away, first do..." and rambled off lists of activities that sounded great, I had NO idea how to fill up a 53-minute block, much less my 95-minute block day once a week.  I could only do little activities for so long and then I felt like I was throwing soo much information at my students. 

So, my intent with this blog is to be really honest.  I am NOT an expert in TPRS.  I'm barely keeping my head above water, but I hope that my honesty in this experience is helpful to someone who starts TPRS next year!