Here is some stuff about reading from Bryce Hedstrom. This the first of four parts:
A few years ago, when I was more blissfully over-confident in my skills, I would push through all four of Blaine Ray’s level I novels in Spanish I. If it worked, I could get those poor 8th and 9th graders to plow through all of the novels and do reasonably well on big tests over the books. I was proud that I could get students to do that. But now as I look back, I’m not so sure that all of those students enjoyed it or learned as much as I thought they had learned.
As I have had to coordinate with other teachers, and especially as I have worked with student teachers from the university, I have had to cut back to three novels in Spanish I. And that may still be too much. This year we may still get in three, but if we don’t, it’s OK. Two will be fine. We just started Patricia va a California. Years ago I would have forced it at the end of first semester, or at least by the beginning of second semester.
But this year we are going slower and deeper. I am consciously spending more time just chatting in Spanish. The goal is, as Ben said, “CI bell to bell”. I don’t always make it, but I shoot for the 95%+ comprehensible Spanish mark each day. Actually it is Krashen’s “i + 1” level I am aiming at, but during the daily voyage there are lulls to “i-1” (real easy Spanish stuff, that is old hat and cake to everyone) and there are occasional gusts to “i+2” and beyond (when I forget the level for a moment and bluster off into vocabulary that is too tough for almost everybody).
As we work our way through the novels, we are enjoying each chapter and savoring each situation. We are building parallel stories and back stories and off-shoot stories (I will explain what I mean by those later). We are comparing Patricia’s school and family and town and life to our own. We talk about right and wrong and wisdom and foolishness (Philosophy? In Spanish I?). We are talking more. We are enjoying it more.
One pleasant outcome of this slower, deeper pace showed up in registration numbers. This year we have six Spanish I classes, next year we have… six Spanish II classes. All but five students have signed up for the next level. This is largely due to the influence of my new colleague, Amy Martinson, who teaches four of the Spanish I classes this year. She was my student teacher last year and had observed for two years before that. She teaches with TPRS and she is good at it. I realize that some students are taking Spanish for the college entrance requirement credit and would have signed up for the second level classes anyway, but most are not. I teach in a small working class town that has become a bedroom community. The majority of students in our school traditionally have not been college bound.