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Verb Slam Activity (VSA) – 3
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20 thoughts on “Verb Slam Activity (VSA) – 3”
I did this very thing this quarter. Except I put all the verbs I was going to target into a PowerPoint with pictures. We did some PQA and L&D to start class for the first six weeks or so with these verbs. I know they didn’t fully acquire all verbs we looked at, but they were at least familiar when we got to them in stories.
I love circling verbs. You can even throw some TPR in there and really make it visceral. And when that happens, it sticks.
Overall, I was super pleased with how it turned out. I decided to make this a permanent fixture in all my courses.
I’m in total agreement of course. Verbs carry a lot of the sentence meaning. Beginners especially, when focusing on meaning, will be devoting their limited processing resources to the verbs and the most important nouns.
The Super 7 verbs should be the early focus. And they are used in all those classic TPRS stories: THERE IS a boy. He IS smart. He IS in Jamaica. He LIKES dinosaurs. He HAS a T-Rex and WANTS a Stegosaurus. He GOES to the Galapagos Islands.
I experimented this year, and would probably be more methodical about it next year, at working fast to build a high-frequency verb foundation. That for me means doing some TPR, Visualization, and PQA (PVA). Then, in all subsequent MovieTalks (or L&D’s if you prefer those), I’d deliberately use those verbs. They’d be in all the texts during shared reading and extensive reading.
I have a Word Wall with the 50 most frequent verbs in the present tense third person singular and it’s on the back wall. It’s more for me than it is the students.
I know this is sacrilegious to our CI Faith, but I’m thinking that next year I will make available during extensive reading time the flashcards by tense and person (e.g. a pack of flashcards of all high frequency verbs in the present tense first person) and the visualization cards. Perhaps, I even set it up as a station they all rotate to. I believe that TPRS can often be overly narrow, neglecting students of i+1 and not recycling the language. I see this as a way to consolidate breadth and depth. They don’t have to take the time-consuming route of inferring the surface meaning of the words. They are given the superficial meaning (flashcards & all the other activities listed above) and then will have opportunities during extensive reading (SSR) and listening (MovieTalk) to acquire the deeper meanings of these words.
Eric, if you find this truly effective, it may also tick the box of “the brain (class) craves novelty/we always do the same thing.
Eric, I think I missed something….what are Visualization and Visualization cards? Also, what are you doing with the flash cards, just having students quiz one another in stations?
https://benslavic.com/blog/using-visualization-to-learn-verbs-eric-herman/
I’m not sure what I’ll have kids do at the flashcard station. Self or partner study. Maybe it will also be a “book-writing” station, where my kids write and illustrate more books for our classroom library. But I do feel like I will introduce verbs horizontally at that station, i.e. only third person singular verb cards will be available at first, then later in the year first person, etc. Essentially, they’ll treat verbs in the way vocabulary is traditionally treated. Of course, this wouldn’t work if it were all that was done, but there will be proportionally more time spent in extensive reading and listening.
Thanks Eric,
I tried to remember where these were and couldn’t find them. I think that they are a fantastic way to give meaning to the high frequency verbs.
Andrew you are already doing it – both you and Eric and probably others are ahead of me on this. We are all tapping into the astral realm on this idea and pulling it down at once, it looks like. Focusing on verbs with Power Point slides and via L and D is exactly where I am going with this series of articles. Actually I was just going to do it with L and D but it’s all the same, and depends on our own teaching styles. The overall formula is the same. I only experimented with it in May and so couldn’t get a really good read on it so you and Eric and others who are going to ride this Verb Wall horse into the fall need to critique my ideas with L and D to see if they need tweaking, which I think they will. I’m just glad to see us now focusing on THREE big things in the fall – personalization, the Classroom Rules and VERBS.
Eric you have been spearheading the discussion on verbs here all year and people have gotten some great ideas. Your 50 verb wall in the 3rd person singular forms with no translations, just the verb in the TL, is where this series of articles is going. There will be some variations, as you will see when I get the next few articles out, but we are always riffing on each other on this site, from whence comes our effectiveness, I believe. The reason I am getting so verbose about this, though, started out when you started talking about verbs back in the middle of the year here. I am very excited about the plan outlined here. Not enough to go back into the classroom in the fall, but you get what I mean.
Funny… I keep a list of target verbs, vocab, and phrases on my back wall too, with no translation. It’s more for me than for the kids.
You know, I’ve also played around with teaching a verb compliment when teaching a verb to help with that mental representation we want kids to do. I see this with the target structures in the Matava scripts. For instance, when I taught “gives” I included a flower. So the structures was “(s)he gives a flower”. I focused on that image of a flower for some time when doing PQA with “gives”.
I did some of the same. We used TPR to do he plays golf. Then naturally they removed the plays and used it with other games.
Oh, Sean. Good one! The verb complement. In French, knowing a verb is only part of the story. I may know how to say “I try”, but if I fail to hear the preposition and infinitive that follow, I don’t know too much. “He tries” comes to mind, but “he tries to impress a girl” is so much more useful and used!
To clarify: my Word Wall has the English translation. But my students hardly look at the wall. It might as well only have the L2.
How about keeping a laminated page with most frequently used verbs+ connector words.. on the kids’ tables as a reference during free-writes?
I picked up the idea from 3rd graders who use it to help write in L1.
Each set of tables shares a sheet.
May be useful for floating teachers who have no wall space ?
This is huge. However, in schools where respect for property is a problem maybe we should keep them in a stack to be handed out when free writes are done. I will add this in to the article. Thank you, Catharina.
Yes, Catharina, I was planning to do something similar for my classes next year in part because I will be in a small classroom, so I need to keep stuff on the walls to a minimum. But they need some reference with these things. I might make a couple versions – one with more on it for Chinese 3 & 4.
I will also no longer be teaching kids who each have a tablet computer with them. So I have the school providing “Tibi” cards — these are credit-card sized and show the pinyin and character for highest-frequency words. Very helpful in switching from typing fluency writes to hand-writing fluency writes, because calling a character to mind from memory and hand-writing it takes the longest to acquire.
I am excited about this. My plan for my professional goal for next year will involve making sure that I am using high frequency vocabulary, especially verbs. Part of my thinking is that I will be able to concretely show that we are on the right track and see how much our text might be pulling me off track.
This year I posted the 12(?) most common verbs in the s/he forms for does, did, was doing forms (Sp only). It was nice to have to laser-beam forms that came up in class. It was more for reference than as scope/sequence. I went through them (with me in Spanish/them in English) the other day and I saw again how much the pressure to stay with the textbook group keeps one from everyday language.
I can’t believe you have anything to do with a textbook, Nathaniel, if your posts from this past year are any indication. You seem to be flying far above the text book graveyard.
It’s just reps reps and more reps. I kind of wish I were teaching next year, no kidding, just to see if I could do a better job with verbs because of this Look and Discuss Plan. Or maybe this idea won’t work at all. All I know is that we need to keep on top of finding ways to make verbs the center point of all we do.
And the other thing we need to do is be humble and accept that if we only get 5,000 reps on a verb in one year where they need 10,000, it’s o.k. I am not going to stop with the snarky comments about how much time is needed to learn a language.
There are so many teachers who are laboring under the illusion that they are capable of teaching something in a certain amount of reps when twice that number is needed. They burn out.
I know. It’s embarrassing. But we try to keep the textbook properly buried.
Five years ago my principal/former dept coordinator was in for an evaluation. The focus was on irregular family command forms. We did the Gail Mackey song, I believe some TPR, played a game, threw in some culture, very high level of laughter and involvement (all were involved), way over 90% in Spanish. The most telling feedback I received was that it was noticed that not one student had her textbook. That was just one year after the Stamp out TPRS Inquisition.
In Spanish I the other teachers are very much textbook people. So I try to play the game too. We dig up our textbooks to do some Susie Gross vocabulary grids and some end of the lesson review lessons for HW. The kids hate that part, but when the exam is over we get back to PQA and possibly a story and reading with reference to topical vocab and staying in T2 before the next gravedigger routine. The tough part is the fear that they will not be properly “crammed” for the book exams. And I did get one anonymous complaint about that. So, like Blaine once advised, if you lose your job you won’t be able to do TPRS at all.
So that is why I want to try the high freq route. And the stress on verbs can be mistaken for teaching from the textbook. The difference being that textbooks do not know how to properly teach verbs.
I can’t believe you have anything to do with a textbook, Nathaniel, if your posts from this past year are any indication. It’s just reps reps and more reps. I kind of wish I were teaching next year, no kidding, to see if I could do a better job with verbs because of this Look and Discuss Plan. Or maybe it won’t work at all. All I know is we need to keep on top of finding ways to make verbs the center point of all we do. And the other thing we need to do is to be humble and accept that if we only get 5000 reps on a verb in one year where they need 10000, it’s o.k. I am not going to stop with the snarky comments about how much time is needed to learn a language. There are so many teachers who are laboring under the illusion that they are capable of teaching something in a certain amount of reps when twice that number is needed. They burn out.
I took this idea from Ruben Vyn at iFLT last year. I took pictures of how he had his walls set up – on one wall he had letter sized paper with all of the verbs he would be using – just the 3rd sing of each verb with no translation. I used Paul Kirschling’s list you posted to begin the year and as we PQA’d , TPR’d, used the verb in stories, etc. , I put the verb up on the wall. Every once in a while, I would point to the word and ask for the gesture that went with it or just a simple translation. It was a great reference for me, but the kids had a real visual for what they had acquired in French. It kind of lost steam at the end, but this discussion has renewed my resolve to make this a part of my routine. Eric may have mentioned re-cycling. So important. I made an effort to recycle old verbs into everything I did. What I found out, I need to do more with peut + infinitive. They get veut + no problem!