Another group member from Chicagoland sends a report and she has a question as well:
Hello Ben,
I am a Spanish teacher in a Chicago progressive private school, a Reggio Emilia inspired school. I teach PK-2nd. This is my first year there and the fifth of my teaching life. I am also an English learner.
I want to thank you for all the the info and knowledge that you share in the community. As a little of background, I have been learning the hows to improve my practice for a while. After a lot of reading about CI and TPRS this past summer I went to the iFLT conference in Chattanooga. I decided to start the year in my new school using as much comprehensible input as possible. In the past I taught in an immersion program and, while I could see the value, I soon realized the necessary CI component was left aside most of the time.
I have tried to use more and more CI just by telling stories to the students and they really enjoy them. It is like magic when you just tell them a good story with a slow pace in your speech, simplified in a way that is comprehensible for them but still compelling, and then when you ask them questions related to what they have listened to or watched they can answer accordingly. It is amazing and I am very happy but I am pretty sure I am not doing TPRS as the Green Bible recommends. I have to read your book soon to learn how the Invisibles work. Just by reading here and watching Tina´s videos I have tried to grasp the idea but I need more input.
I have being doing a mix of things. I will share with you one of the stories that my students enjoyed these past weeks and I would appreciate your insights into it. I started with a mix of story-listening-asking. I told the story with the images projected with the text. While I was doing that I asked questions (kind of circling) and moved on until we finished. Then students (Kindergarten) drew their pictures about the place and the characters and finally I read the story to them without questions.
With second grade I did the same but used different post-telling-reading activities: I set up center stations that they rotated through every 5 minutes. In one of them, students organized the story line, matching the images with the correspondent sentences. In another station, students illustrated the story with their own drawings after reading the story’s sequence of moments. In a third station, the task was to create new sentences with the language structure used in the story (quiere, busca, va, encuentra, se llama), using a die to dictate which structure to use each time. The last station was about spelling these words using wood tiles.
Most recently, I have worked collaboratively with the students to create silly characters before we construct the story for them to fit into. The students seem quite energized when we do this.
I am asking for your and the PLC guidance here. How I should proceed from here. Here is the story:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_R41BRBxpdrOW1rc1ZkVEVJOG8/view