Sometimes I am truly amazed at the speed at which some teachers move deeply into this way of teaching. This report from Laura Cenci is an example:
Hello TPRS community! I hope you will forgive my presumptuousness in doing a really LONG therapeutic download here, but this thread [ed. note: the one on MovieTalk] has helped me pull together where I am in this, my second year of teaching. I summarize it below, and it has been cathartic to put it down in writing. As a new teacher I am encouraged by this thread that I am on the right track. Thanks so much to Eric for sharing examples of his teaching. As a second year TPRSer (alone at my school) it is invaluable to see examples of others!!
Last year I had the MOST success and was the MOST inbounds with MT. The visual boundaries are right there on the screen. I limited videos to 4 minutes. I would look at the clips from the tprs listserve and pull out the new words to teach, making sure we already knew plenty of words to describe the action. Sometimes I would search the word I wanted to teach and find an accompanying video.
As is common, with level one students I spend the first weeks doing TPR gesturing of lots of physical verbs. The kids have fun because they are up and moving and it is different from their other classes. On top of it, the words with gestures, as Eric demonstrated, REALLY make the words stick. Kids will get stuck wanting to say a word and if I do the gesture, the word pops right out of their mouths. Beginning of the year verbs will stick all year. Gesturing is the most powerful tool I have.
Next, it is easy for us all to refer to colors and basic adjectives (that are lots of cognates in Spanish) displayed on my walls and do some one word images when we do PQA. This makes it simple to build little stories (such as Susan Gross’ first week of school mouse family and cat story). This builds their confidence.
Then when the TPR novelty begins to wear off, MT is a super next step – flashy, novel, but they are still hearing tons of L2 and now they can chime in. The L2 production is natural and gives more confidence. Show, say, Mr. Bean falling down the stairs and the kids yell “falls!” “it hurts him” “yells” “cries” because those are the words they’ve been gesturing. It’s almost like a step between TPR into the air and talking to another person in a conversation. With the movie you can use as much or as little detail as the class can handle. You just scaffold.
With MT you can stop the video a million times to discuss the size, color, number, boy girl – whatever depending on the class level. It is a cinch to type up a few scaffolded readings, do a dictation, act it out, read it some more, then get them to write it up for their Friday writing, or if you are good at doing CLOZE worksheets (or just verbally) have them fill in the blanks. Or write up a quiz using question words and give them choices or, by the end of the unit, they should be able to write a short answer.
I recently combined Blaine’s weekly schedule with Ben’s two week schedule and Reading Option A activities so that I could practice going deeper with the story on hand. That has been the biggest gain I have made this year, I think, is using the arsenal of activities shared here so I can keep using the same material and keep the kids interested. Today was a really low interest day of circling a story from last week that didn’t have lots of acting opportunities and no art visuals. I need to incorporate a class artist each story. But tomorrow I will have them illustrate the story and change some details then share with the class, and Friday do a 5 minute write up.
I always start with the video first – its a big hook, though if your students have a good attention span you could read it first and circle it and they would be ready to narrate when they see it. For me, however, my students pay MUCH better attention with repetition and circling (into the ground) with a visual (watching the supporting visuals of MT) than without them on a class built story. I know we can illustrate and act a class story, but here is where I use my technology – everyone loves to stare at a screen.
I struggle getting my actors to illustrate instead of distract, and Story Asking is my biggest weakness – staying in bounds and making the story engaging, even with scripts. But on occasion we come up with a good one, but it is such a Zen activity – everyone has to be in the right place, with the right structures and enough personal input to make it engaging. But I want to conquer it.
So far this year I have done Story Asking (3 steps with reading, sometimes using Mad Libs format), read Tumba (adding with PQA and acting and the inherent culture in the story) and Movie Talk (Help! and will start another one after Thanksgiving). I feel that if I can rotate through these three tools this year I will have the opportunity to improve my 1. story asking skills – which I know will improve with more time and practice – while giving the students some 2. inbounds variety and interest with MT, and 3. inbounds and (lesser) interest with novels. And for a new teacher, this is giving me enough confidence and success to keep my morale up.
Thanks for letting me vent – and thanks to all of you for writing here and at moreTPRS – whenever I need help I have been able to tap in and get the boost I needed!