In talking today about teaching younger kids (7th grade and below) Diane said:
“The biggest things I learned: take high school ideas and simplify them radically. Add some way students can move during the activity (if only to draw, or to point, or to throw something). Then make them last 10-20 minutes tops, then switch to something else. I planned with 15 to 20 minute blocks of activity in mind — might get 2 of those done in a 45-minute class. Having a chart of choices based on step of TPRS really, really helped me.”
Diane also mentioned how Catharina has written extensively on this topic on the Forum and Jody and Alisa and Eric and many others in the group of course are experts in this area. I’m just trying to simplify it here so I can remember the basics that must be followed if we are to reach those younger kids. What I glean from the comments on this thread so far about teaching younger kids using CI are four general ideas (are there more?) –
1. Simplify high school ideas
2. 10 to 20 min. tops for those activities
3. Get them moving around the room
3. Use a chart of choices (what I call my Play Book Cards)
Julie has written on how avoids using English to make TPR work with her middle school students:
“The topic of using English in the classroom, specifically in giving classroom instructions, is one that I have been working with the last 2 years. The first 3 weeks to month of the school year I exclusively do TPR in my classroom with no stories. I teach a multitude of structures including but not limited to: sit down, stand up, turn around, raise your hand, enter, exit, return, take out, put away, open, close, throw away, pick up, walk toward, run toward, write, draw, read, etc. I then teach them every object in the classroom such as pencil, pen, book, piece of paper, smart board, wall, floor, chair, desk, door, window, etc.
“I begin by introducing stand up, sit down and chair and desk. We practice these over and over and I have a poster of adverbs on the wall that I slowly introduce to make things more exciting. Examples of my adverbs are slowly, quickly, silently, crazily, perfectly, bored, excitedly, romantically, etc. I will say things such as stand up crazily, turn around slowly and sit down perfectly. They simply TPR the actions. Then I introduce the term “like” and will tell them things like sit down bored, stand up like a zombie and turn around like a ninja. Again, this makes things more interesting but all the while you are simply teaching them the classroom commands (yet masked with a lot of fun).
“Slowly, I then introduce take out, open, close and put away and teach them book, notebook, piece of paper, door, window, closet (all things that can be opened, closed, taken out OR put away). We continue in a similar style – giving them fun and interesting commands and having them practice the different objects in conjunction with the structure, while throwing in some funny adverbs.
“I also will make laminated labels of all the different objects and will have competitions to see which students can label the classroom objects the quickest (simply gimmicks to incorporate more reps and practice). This goes on for however long it takes for me to teach all the structures used in giving classroom instructions and all the objects that are used in the class. Some different activities that I incorporate to practice these skills are the following:
1.) Simon Says (always a great practicing activity)
2.) Competition to label the classroom with the laminated object cards (these are laminated on bright yellow paper and are put up and taken down to practice and then once students have mastered the words and taken a quiz/test on them, they then stay up for the rest of the school year)
3.) Charades (Student reads a notecard with commands such as enter the class sadly, walk toward the window like a ballerina, open the window perfectly and run to your desk. The class has to guess what was being done and the correct response gets to go next.)
4.) Group Notecard Presentation (Groups of 3 students are given a stack of 8-10 commands using a variety of the structures learned and a variety of the objects. One is the teacher and two are students. They have to practice their notecards and then present for the class as the other students in the class judge them on their ability to read, understand and accurately act out the cards.)
5.) School Scavenger hunt (Students are given a list of things to find in the school such as a flag of Mexico, a purple pencil, a science book, etc) They must find the object and take a picture of it with their phone and report back first to the class.
6.) The learning of the classroom commands and objects will then be culminated with a quiz on all the structures.
“I also incorporate different places in the school as well such as nurse’s office, auditorium, cafeteria, playground, gym, office, locker, hallway, parking lot, etc. These are great because they can be incorporated in future stories and they are useful when moving around the school.
“At this point we are nearing October and we begin with PQA and storytelling, because I can NOW conduct the class entirely in Spanish and all commands and structures are comprehensible. Also, all these words are very useful for future stories – great foundation of vocabulary.
“Hope you find this helpful! It has been extremely effective in setting up the school year successfully for my middle schoolers!”