First Class – 5 – Starting Our Verb Wall

4 thoughts on “First Class – 5 – Starting Our Verb Wall”

1. Jeff

   August 4, 2015 at 4:47 pm

   I went in to set up my classroom today and this is one thing I’m struggling with. Do you have a verb wall and a separate word wall? Do you do word associations with those 50 verbs that make up your curriculum or with the other words that you will need to make language? If your first class masters the word, it goes up on the wall. But what do you do for the next 4 classes?
   Sorry about all the questions. I want to hit the ground running.

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2. Ben Slavic

   August 5, 2015 at 5:02 am

   Jeff there is no right way with all this. What I have in mind is a word wall just because I like word walls. It even has some verbs on it. Kids can refer to it during class, do free writes from it, etc. Like the CWB cards there is no need to “get them taught”. They get our attention when they get our attention. Remember, I teach for June. I refuse to let some kind of list (associated with some kind of pacing guide associated with some kind of chapter in a book associated with some sort of program that purports to be able to bring the language to the children but can’t really because language acquisition unlike other classes doesn’t occur in a particular order that we can know about so why sweat it?) dictate what I do on a day to daily basis.
   Now on the verbs, they go up on the empty sheets of paper at the top of the walls. I don’t do word associations with them. I just teach them as described above and when I have really gotten a lot of reps on them (when the instruction has been “saturated”) then I just put up the word at the end of the day after all the classes have done the same work with the verb. Now this will be a problem for TPRS programs that have morphed into levels, but my classes here in India this year have never done CI, so I can pretty much assume they are all at the same place, even if they have had a “year of French” or two before. They probably, actually they certainly will benefit from the new CI. With different classes at different levels, I don’t know how I would do that.
   Does that answer your questions all right?

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3. Jeff

   August 5, 2015 at 6:04 am

   I think so, let me try to restate in my words.
   So I’m going to take the Spanish word wall from page 84 in your book (I may add or subtract of course) and have all those words already on my wall. Then after bell work for the first month or two, we are going to do word associations and gestures for a few minutes each class more or less. Then we move on.
   As for the VERBS. I will just teach them in step one of TPRS, in PQA, in stories, in VSA, etc. and then add them to empty sheets of paper one at a time so students can refer to them, remember them, use them, and know that we covered them. I will add them at the end of the day when all classes have exhausted them to my satisfaction.
   Thanks for your help! Hope India is going great.

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   1. Ben Slavic

      August 5, 2015 at 8:17 am

      Yes on the word wall. Your first paragraph is spot on what I personally do but I also start classes in other ways as per those “starting class” ideas in my book, of course.
      On the verbs – what you said here:
      …I will just teach them in step one of TPRS, in PQA, in stories, in VSA, etc. …
      And some of the etceteras are TPR, Look and Discuss, vPQA, etc. The point is that we sometimes get too bogged down in exactly what strategy we are doing when the entire point of it all, as you know, is to teach using comprehensible input. (I am saying that for me this year it is all going to be about teaching verbs using comprehensible input.)
      But yeah your description in both sentences above is what I myself plan on doing. Others certainly do it in other ways, to reflect their own personalities as teaching artists, where whimsy and the unexpected always drive the instruction, instead of those sad canned lessons where each class was exactly the same, those days that are thankfully now over and in the dusty bins of failed instructional methods that characterized the last century.

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