I have asked Deena, as a new PLC member, to send in frequent Reports from the Field this fall, since she describes so well what she is experiencing in implementing comprehensible input in her classroom from scratch, as it were.
Here are the links to the first two excellent reports we received from her:
https://benslavic.com/blog/report-from-the-field-deena-swenson/ https://benslavic.com/blog/report-from-the-field-deena-swenson-2/
Here is Deena’s latest report, sent in today:
Hi Ben,
I have really been trying to stay on task in circling and last week was really hard. I kept reading the articles from the PLC and I re-read bits of Stepping Stones as well. Kids were kind of getting tired of me last week. And that was on Wednesday.
So on Wednesday afternoon , I tried out One Word Images (OWI) with one class at the end of the day. I followed your video with le poisson, and had a student come up and be my pescado, (which is more of a fish that one eats, not the animal, but here’s where I sort of feel like “who cares? they will not know the difference…whatever!”) in the front of the class on my roll-y chair and he felt pretty special. So I went through some of the questions like “what does the fish call itself?”, “what color is the fish?”, “Is the fish big or small?”, etc… I was really slow and I pointed and paused, a lot. I hadn’t given any jobs yet and I missed out on a lot of information. I tried to re-write the “scenes” that the students created after school and it went ok.
Thursday, I did the same with two different animals for each class. The three first classes of the day hadn’t done the OWI on Wednesday, so they took a little more time to get into it, but they did get it and they really started “playing the game”! I am very pleased with the majority of my students and how they are shaping up to be into playing with me. Some, of course, are not participating and I let them know on Friday that we’d be starting with the participation grades this week.
Today, I chose volunteers for Clapper, Quiz Writer, Counters, Artist, and I added Notetaker (to write down the information in English, so that I could keep track of what was being created in each of the four classes.) SUCCESS!!!! Today went really well. I gave a quick quiz…only 5 questions at the end of each class and I would say about 90% of my students scored 5/5. I’m not sure what to do about the kids that don’t tell me they don’t understand. I guess I just roll with what I’m doing and hope that I can see the confusion or non-recognition on their faces if they don’t understand. I also have quite a few students that earned 2’s for participation today…I’m using jgr McCurry…So there will be some unhappy students…It’s not like they are the inattentive students either…they just don’t participate. Any suggestions?
All in all, it’s been good. I’m happy with how things are going and glad to see that most of my students are enjoying my class. Where do I go from here? I had my students do a reading last week on Friday that included some of the TPR words from last week and words from the “scenes” we created last week as well. They were able to understand it perfectly and my Spanish 1 students were really upset that they couldn’t. I taught them last year and they couldn’t understand the paragraph that the beginners could understand. That’s all the proof I need that CI and TPRS is where it’s at.
Have a great week!!!
Deena