Alisa gives a tour de force critique of our video from Israel. It honors our vision here – to use the internet to get better at TPRS! Thank you Alisa. You are real teacher in every sense of the word!
Joseph,
This is so exciting…You probably know that I am a huge cheerleader!
I hope you don’t think I’m criticizing the lesson in any way. I am deeply interested in observing novices learn Hebrew, and I’d like to help – you are /Sarah is doing great work in uncharted territory with no training wheels!
I went through this video with a fine-tooth comb.
Couple of thoughts:
It’s awesome to see Sarah progressing in the essential skills – she seems more confident about what to say next than in the first video, (FYI- personally, I could do without the music in the background. It makes it harder to hear/decipher what’s going on.
- TPR/gesturing: Especially with younger children it’s good to sometimes stand up and TPR/gesture the verbs as we circle them – so i.e., every time she says, “ratz” he can do a running gesture or pause AND have the kids do it – Even command: “Show me “ratz”- so that it’s more ‘visceral’ and in the body, as Ben might say. You might give some run or swim commands within the house throughout the story as a mini break: swim to the sofa, run to the door – swim fast, run slowly, etc… You can work on a narrow targeted set of verbs every few minutes with movement to shake things up and get them off their chairs. You can tell when this is needed when you see the posture wilt and the fiddling and wiggling – which is normal for kids and tells us to get them moving! We must pay attention to our kids’ body language throughout…
Sometimes when I want a one word answer of a verb meaning, all I have to do is start the agreed upon gesture and it falls from their mouths – the gesture and word are THAT connected. It looks like the kids are pretty solid on ‘ratz’ (=run/s) but you get what I mean about layering more gesturing – it slows us down and strengthens mental representation, and gives a mini-brain break or an ‘up.’ Massage in new verbs that you’re working on sparingly into the ‘dough’ of the other more familiar verbs – with novel TPR commands and combos.
- The Boards: You have tons of interrogatives on the question board, and while Sarah uses the laser pointer very effectively, you might want to limit the interrogatives to the ones you’re going to use, so there’s less visual clutter/potential for confusion or overwhelm.
I separate the Q words on different mini-posters and only start w/the basics like What? Who? and Where? – and pull out the rest one-by-one only if/as needed.
By the end of the 17 minutes the empty board was completely filled up – too much new language for one sitting /session.
- Translations: We (elem teachers) in my district have adopted a ‘standard’ notation for our board translations: Black for the TL word/chunk, underlined; red for it’s translation in English underneath. More predictable and keeps the board more organized. These practices are important for younger children (but they work all the way up to teaching adults)- I had to remind Blaine to do this when he did a demo in my classroom a few weeks ago! We need to keep our boards pretty sparse – insuring that they get only a few new items (3 max) at a time – especially as they combine with all the interrogatives and connecting words…interest will flag if there’s a perception of TOO MUCH WORK. The board ends up entirely full and even crowded…
Also I’m noticing that some facts of the story accumulated on the small board…in English. Why?
- Ivrit/Hebrew text: I’m working this out and have consulted with Terry Waltz on the cold character reading aspect – are the kids familiar with the Hebrew alef-bet? If they can now decode/read Hebrew, then do you need the transliteration anymore (i.e., “Yesh eesh”)? Again just asking in the name of streamlining and eliminating excess text. Please comment on this facet of the kids’ acquisition. No need to have all 3: Hebrew, English and transliteration.
- Staying In Bounds: This is the biggest issue, in my opinion.
As Sarah gains deeper understanding of the strategies, she will be able to circumlocute to use the most hi-frequency forms of the words. For example she said, “Ani Iteet,” ‘I am slow’ – this is a very low-freq Hebrew expression compared to staying with Ratz and claiming, “Ani lo ratzah ma’hair.” (I don’t run fast). She adds in new (?) verbs like swim and shoot – and then doesn’t get many reps on ’em – I say stay much narrower at this early stage/novice level and leave the distractors outta the mix. Also I noticed there aren’t any cognates – Hebrew and English have plenty – I recommend exploiting them to lighten the cognitive load.