Lesson Plans 2

4 thoughts on “Lesson Plans 2”

1. Michele

   June 28, 2011 at 10:33 am

   I love this! And it’s just in time for me to marry it with a template and request for a plan for using music in the classroom. I’m going to try to do that in TPRS fashion. My grand idea is to write the plan, then videotape myself teaching it this fall.
   The request came from Indiana University, whose Slavic department just flew me and three other Russian teachers to Bloomington to join a group of about 30 for a two-day workshop on music in the Russian classroom with Laurie Iudin-Nelson, former director of the Russian Village at Concordia. She thinks of TPRS as one of her “tools,” but I accept her because she is one of those magical teachers who shares the “do no harm” philosophy. I decided that a workshop on music is about the only kind of session outside a TPRS workshop that unites teachers. We didn’t have too much argument over teaching philosophy, even though I was there.
   So…let the plans multiply!

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2. Ben Slavic

   June 28, 2011 at 11:03 am

   Michele, if you feel like it, please add any kinds of details with us here on the above work with IU as it becomes clear in your mind. I, for one, am all ears, as it were.
   I keep feeling the pull of the water – the water of the comprehensible input ocean that we are all discovering together – pulling towards music. It’s pulling on my ankles. We have developed Blaine’s idea of the three steps into a superior plan to deliver maximum amounts of comprehensible input in the form of stories and reading, both de rigueur in any classroom that expects actual acquisition, and yet there is this powerhouse tidal force of music, an untapped ocean (we haven’t even broken its surface) waiting to be explored. Wouldn’t it be funny if we just chucked everything we have come up with over the years to do an entire week of CI around music? Just thinking out loud here….

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3. Susan Gross

   July 7, 2011 at 5:15 pm

   You could do a whole 4-year sequence around music. CI is CI. Back in the 60s I remember a Minnesota teacher whose entire 4-year French curriculum was French opera. He had huge success. Incredibly fluent students. I never saw anything approaching that level of fluency until TPR Storytelling.
   Michele, I wish I had known about you going to Bloomington. Our son Chris was there for two years and they have a friend there who is teaching Uzbek and trying to use TPR Storytelling. She went to my workshop and she watched Linda Li’s DVD. But she could have gained a lot by meeting you and maybe even attending this conference. In fact, I wonder if she was there!

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4. Michele

   July 8, 2011 at 5:59 pm

   Susie, I chose the Bloomington workshop because I could go for only two days– you know why! I’m absolutely sure your Uzbek friend was in the room. There were 28 or 32 languages represented by people teaching there this summer, the most common shared language being Russian. (Mongolian, Pashtu, Uzbek, Kirgiz, Tadjik, Turkish…) We did a lot of dancing around the idea of CI, but I restrained myself from evangelizing.
   I’ve just been reading Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation.” A chapter at the end discusses the theory that music was our first language, one that we share with many animals (and birds). Evidently whale songs and human music have much in common.
   Another chapter talks about how two Autism teachers made a huge breakthrough when they taught children with Autism to ask questions. That made me sit up, because that’s what we did with our child with ASD, and because now that I ask a million questions, my students finally ask questions too, and sometimes they get rated higher than they should (in my estimation) on OPI’s — probably because they do ask questions. I’ve taught them that it’s a good way both to keep conversations going so as to hear more input on a topic they control, and also so as to keep from having to talk much themselves. It works.

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