CDs

Spanish Thematic Unit CD by Ben Slavic - $5.00

French Thematic Unit CD by Ben Slavic - $5.00

Since schools don’t understand blanket success of the kind we get in TPRS, and in order to keep my administrators’ view of my grading system as one that reflects a “normal” grade distribution, I have created some CDs that go with the French and Spanish Thematic Units on the “posters” page of this website.

The CDs contribute greatly to my being able to focus on stories and readings in my actual TPRS classes. In my district, students are required to learn certain vocabulary grouped around thematic units like weather, time, clothing, etc. If I were to take the time to actually teach these words as discrete items in class, I would effectively be prevented from doing TPRS. Yet I have to teach those words.

Therefore, I have taken every single word required by my district for the Spanish and French level I thematic units and listed them on this site on the posters, etc. page. CDs to accompany those lists are available to my students so that they can go to my site and study the vocabulary at home while looking at the words and listening to the CDs.

You are invited to download the thematic units from this site and transfer them to your site at no charge. There is a nominal $5.00 fee for the CDs, which can be ordered via PayPal from this site. You are free to make as many copies of the CDs for your students, or have them do so, as you wish.

In case I am unable to bring certain of the thematic unit vocabulary into stories during the year, I can be assured that the students who have done this work at home know the words and are ready for level 2 in the way that traditional teachers expect.

By giving the work at home, those who do it are rewarded and those who don’t can’t just get an easy A by merely coming to class and paying attention to the stories and readings. It really is a good system, because at parent conferences I am able to tell parents and administrators that I give homework and big vocabulary tests, and can ask if the child has been working with the words to prepare for the monthly tests. As odd as it sounds, teachers who do not do those things in their foreign language classrooms are often perceived as going against the culture, which involves judging kids and finding things wrong with them.

How do I test using these CDs? I randomly choose 50 words every thirty days from the color coded lists that you see on the French Thematic Units on the posters, etc. page. Each test in my classroom occurs on the 8th of each month, to make the test predictable for the students. Students can make up a failed test at anytime.

You will be surprised and pleased at how this approach forces students to learn these words. They work to your advantage in many ways:

1. the onus of responsibility lies with the child
2. you don’t have to do daily checks for homework, and therefore can get right into teaching for fluency in each class
3. the students know the vocabulary that they need to know for level 2
4. the students are held accountable for outside work, allowing you to create the image of a responsible teacher who gives tests and homework and who rewards hard working students, thus making your TPRS program fit more naturally into the actual school environment
5. you don’t have to worry about using words like pencil sharpener and stapler in stories, which are not really great words for stories
6. kids love lists
7. parents have no way of pointing the finger at you, which is increasingly common in schools, if their child doesn’t get a high grade

I count these tests fairly heavily, thus balancing the high grades earned in class because the kids love the stories so much. It is just another way to make TPRS work in the restrictive environment of schools, which seem to be based on the somewhat archaic idea that, if some kids aren’t doing well, then there is something wrong with a teacher’s program of study.

[Note: the “word list” posters that are used on the walls of my classroom to do the various activities that one finds in PQA in aWink! – one word images and the word chunk team activities, etc. (see handouts link on this site) are the very same words as those from the Spanish and French Thematic Units. They are, however, randomly mixed with a number of verbs and other parts of speech on the word list posters. This allows a proper combination of words for the daily in-class activities, while at the same time providing the students with more repeats of the thematic unit vocabulary in class.]

"When we work in schools, certain grade distribution patterns are expected, which directly conflicts with the idea that nothing motivates like success. It is strange, but that is how it works. I designed this CD program for level 1 classes with that in mind."

Ben Slavic