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Of Trees and Forests 1
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19 thoughts on “Of Trees and Forests 1”
My CI forest for the Upper levels which I am still trying to figure out with all of your help is made of reading and listening. I just wanted to share how I am using the textbook as a source for CI in my German 3/4 class.
I am trying to just use it as a source of things to read. I mentioned before, some other teachers and I wrote stories to go along with each reading in the summer. Now I am doing story 1 one day, just reading it, circling and PQAing the 3 structures, then the next story the 2nd day, then the textbook story, the 3rd day. Then some output things the 4th and 5th day, like write a dialog and present or write a postcard about a trip. Anyway, that is how I am using the textbook. I am ignoring all the “activities” in the book and just reading the little reading sections. Each chapter has 3 or 4 short reading sections. Even though I do have a few structures, they are not thematic, they have verbs. I also have music every week and a short video every Friday, which the kids love.
So, that is going much better for me now. I hope by reading a lot and listening to the music and videos and our discussions, I am providing them a forest of CI without letting Jabba, the textbook, roll over us.
As long as the textbook is not used as the primary source of instruction, (extremely deleterious to CI, the engine that drives acquisition, then it – the textbook – becomes a source of CI, not a preventer of CI. I am just pointing here to the fine thing that is setting up readings via auditory input. That’s my big point here. The reading is part B, if you will, of a two part dance where part A is heavily repeated auditory input that uses the vocabulary from the reading to fuel itself. It is such a wonderful thing to see a kid reading a tough text for the sole reason that it got discussed with SLOW circling the day before. It’s just so cool when they read from a vibrant auditory base.
Hi Melanie,
I think that’s a great way to use the textbook – I use mine that way, too, only I don’t have all the stories written out ahead of time. The difference between what you do and what Ben was describing is, I believe, that you don’t try to “interface” the book and TPRS. I tried to do that for a couple of years and realized that one or the other had to go – they cannot exist as equals, and I could not follow two masters. For you, the book is simply another thing lying around our classroom [that] is excellent fodder for great TPRS instruction.
For me today, the “anything lying around” that I grabbed for Comprehensible Input was the death of Moammar Kaddafi. A German website provided text and pictures about what happened. We read a little and discussed a lot. I was amazed, though, by how clueless some of my older students were about this. “Kaddafi is dead. Was he a good guy or a bad guy?”
My textbook includes “Erlkönig” as one of the poetry readings. After we have read and interacted with it, we listen to the Schubert setting and discuss how the music reinforces the words. (Just did the same thing this week with “99 Luftballons”.) Then we listen to Rammstein’s “Dalai Lama”, and students hear how this guy’s stuff from the 1800s is still relevant and being riffed on today. One of the things I like about “Erlkönig” is that because it is a ballad, it’s a story, just a story in poetic form and then set to music.
I also did a re-set with my level 1 class today. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I had thought the additional year of maturity would work in my favor. Obviously I was wrong, and I had to go back to what TCI is all about and what the expectations are and that from today on I will be determined in application of the rules. I even showed them the disruptive student contract that is the last step before my doing my best to get them out of the class. Then I had to immediately back up what I was saying by getting in a couple of students’ faces. After that the period went well, but I know this class will test me again tomorrow and next week and the week after that.
Hang in there Robert with that Level 1 class. I am happy to hear that someone else knows of my struggles. I was finally able to have a student removed from his second attempt at taking my Spanish 1 class. (Failed it last year -mostly due to being disruptive and not participating) His behavior was poisoning the rest of the students. I would love to hear what your “Disruptive Student” contract is like. I have to (in the following order) 1) change the student’s seat, 2) hold the kid for detention on my time, either at lunch or after school, 3) call home, 4) refer the kiddo to the counselor, 5) refer to an Assistant Principal who then assigns a Saturday School 4-hour detention, and then I repeat numbers 3, 4, and 5 until the administration or the parents are tired of hearing from the “unreasonable teacher who expects way too much from her students” [quote from the parent during a parent conference with the counselor.] Perhaps a “Disruptive Student Contract” would be more effective? Or at least less time-consuming and energy draining on my part?
Report on my classes today:
-As predicted, my level 1 class pushed the boundaries, but I was there every time holding up 1 finger (That’s my beginning Five Finger Rules #1) and saying in English: “There is only one conversation; it is with the whole class and in German.” The period went much better than previously.
-Fridays are music days, so we sang an “oldie but goodie” today, “Deutschvergnügen”. (Anyone remember the old VW commercials with “Fahrvergnügen”?) My sixth period, another rambunctious class but with a completely different vibe, sang their hearts (and lungs) out. Of course I praised them sincerely and told them that they sang the best of all my classes. It was so much fun.
Thanks, Robert. Do you have a German word wall and if so could I have a copy?
No, I don’t have a German word wall, but I’m working on one from the German Frequency Dictionary. I’m pleased to see that I cover nearly all of the high-frequency words in level 1 and 2. There are a couple that surprised me – I think they are more written than spoken – so I will work on incorporating them earlier. (I get to them in levels 3 and 4.)
Every time I read of a CI teacher working with music it makes me think of the excitement and the potential there. I know that we haven’t yet scratched the surface of how music can take this whole thing to the next level.
What’s awesome is when the kids include lyrics from a past song into a dialogue between two characters. I taught Camila’s “Aléjate de mÔ (distance yourself from me) and somehow that lyric made it into the dialogue between two people. Music is power.
Today some of my period six students told me that students from earlier periods had been singing the day’s song at lunch.
Yes and yes. I want to get music back and instead of just doing cloze activities to fill in words perhaps use verses and choruses to farm words and phrases that can be circled. Then listening to the song activates more memory of the words and their meanings. I have started playing sound effects from CD’s imported into iTunes when certain words are asked or explained…
I have some older posts with music ideas on my blog if you want to take a look here:
http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/2009/12/07/music-warms-the-heart.aspx
http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/2009/10/23/layers-of-lyrics.aspx
http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/2009/10/21/musicmovementmeaning.aspx
I’ll look through my handout from Cancun on music and see what I can put up….
with love,
and so happy to have youtube in my world,
Laurie
A colleague wrote me about difficulties teaching songs last week, so today as I was about to start teaching a song, I remembered the video camera in the back of the room. I ignored the fact that one kid really wanted to talk about the skinny cat she found and is trying to adopt out, as well as the other kid whose cat is pregnant, in my rush to get a video done. Tomorrow I’ll have to follow up on those, but the fallout was that the first student could pay almost no attention to the lesson, and the other demonstrated disinterest the entire period. It shows. My bad, as the kids would say. Still, while this may be a “how not to do this,” here it is. Part one starts with a little of the cat discussion; part 2 has a number of tangential discussions. It’s the first day of discussion about a song that we’re going to be singing, talking about the singer as well as the movie that the song goes to, and possibly making up a story that involves the flying car, the girl, and the cats. Who knows. This day, as on other first days of songs that I hadn’t pre-loaded or planned backward, we got into a lot of discussions about individual words and grammar. The kids hear it for the first time at the end of the second video. The kids thought it was really cheesy…the back row whipped out their cell phones and were waving them back and forth with saucy smiles on their faces…but I bet they’ll be singing by next Thursday. They love to hate my choices.
http://youtu.be/M6IT026rKJ8
http://youtu.be/mqMRsVam6pk
(Be gentle . . . I know there’s too much English/too much off-task behavior/and so on. Sometimes I do a better job than this. Luckily none of you are evaluating me!)
I wonder if your video will get lost here in the comments and not everyone will know to watch it.
Anytime anybody posts video even as a comment I will put that blog post under the Videos category, Melanie, but it’s good if someone reminds me so thanks.
Hi Michele, I enjoyed watching your videos. I liked the smile on your face. You looked relaxed the whole time and like you were enjoying your class. I think you were way too hard on yourself, your English pop up grammar was only a few seconds. It seemed like the kids were engaged and participating and enjoying the discussion.
I was surprised to hear Russian at first, so I went and read your bio in Group Members. So, you already have snow?
Is that a Smartboard that you have? If it is, you could copy your song text into a Notebook file and then you can use the full screen and the screen shade and just show one line at a time.
I think a song could be treated like a reading, like Ben was talking about and you could do some pre-reading auditory activities or highlight some of the important structures or new structures that will come up before you do read and translate and discuss it.
But, for me I do songs every Wednesday as a warm up and a lot of times, I don’t want to focus on the structures, I just want to highlight a few things for them to listen for and enjoy the song. I do a couple of songs. So I show them the lyrics, go over it quickly and tell them to listen for a certain phrase or the chorus, or raise their hand when they hear a specific word. Then we watch the music videos. Once in a while I want them to learn the song and then I print out the lyrics and we spend more time on it.
Thanks for sharing your video.
Melanie, THANK YOU!!! (Yeah, shouting.) The SmartBoard, though an aged one with holes in in and the habit of getting uncalibrated every time we have a mini earthquake or a kid hits my computer cart or I trip over the legs, is new to me and I’m going to my first training tomorrow. So I really need ideas of how to use it, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of that one. The only thing is…I have all my songs formatted precisely with twexting on Googledocs, and don’t know whether they would copy over. But it’s well worth a try.
I used songs as almost my whole curriculum last year in one group, and often I do pre-teach the vocabulary through stories, but I was falling back to an old model of teaching a song this time out of non-preparedness. On the other hand, this is the quarter that every single kid has to turn in a song with translation to potentially be used in class, so we’ll be sharing them all now and I won’t spend a whole lot of time on every single one, unless I really like the structures myself or unless a group falls for one song. This one is a critical one for structures and vocabulary that pops up all the time.
I’m betting you have other fab ideas about SmartBoards that I should hear…I am dying for a calendar, for instance, and would love to know what else I’m missing. If you have time to contact me off line, I’d sure appreciate it… my school address starts like this: whaley_michele and ends like this: @asdk12.org
(Old habit of not putting the whole address in one place for spam reasons…don’t know whether it’s still necessary on a private blog.)
Thank you for ideas, thank you for watching!!
Here is what I like about using a SMARTBOARD:
* if you teach in different rooms, you can simply transfer files, lessons, presentations, etc to that computer, either through a school server or memory stick/thumbdrive
* If you use a blank document as your “white board” during class you have a record of exactly what structures (in or out of bounds) you provided for each class.
* if you post text from a reading on the board, you can mark it up with the pens, in multiple colors, and save those markings on top of the document in a separate file.
* if you need to look something up online, you can do so almost instantly (unless your school has a filter).
*the projectors are bright enough that you don’t have to turn out the lights and risk students falling asleep.
That said, I would be perfectly happy with a plain old digital projector. For much of the time, the board is nothing more than a $2000 projection surface. One thing I really like is a document camera, which lets you place any reading or object (student artwork!) under it for all to see. I would get one of these before springing for an interactive board. Sometimes you cannot access the documents you want to put on the board, so it’s great to have what is basically a very fancy overhead projector, but one which doesn’t require transparencies. I’m sure there are many many features that I’m not utilizing on my board, but I am also very aware of the fact that, much of the time, technology merely intrudes into the human interaction that is the core of true language learning. I think Ben mentioned this elsewhere, but all you really need is a computer with Word, and a projector to do the CI thing. How about a laminator and a nerf gun? All else is superfluous and will not make you a better teacher. My very eccentric teacher Reginald Foster, Latinist to the Pope, once said about fancy boards: “Hell, you could teach a class just fine with toilet paper and lipstick!”
I agree…I’ve been suffering in my little ol’ relo with a torn screen for my LCD projector which couldn’t be replaced, so when a history teacher was trying to unload this portable one, I jumped at the chance. I like it when kids can really see what I put up there. But today I had small groups and I was working with a whiteboard, two pens, and only five words, and it was like getting back to nature or something.