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!