Grant Boulanger shares an idea about verb walls, one that I don’t endorse but that others might want to explore:
Ben,
As you know, I was involved in immersion education for a long while. My daughter is in second grade in a local Spanish immersion school and I was recently there for conferences.
I looked up and smacked my forehead. There, on the wall, were hi-frequency verbs. But, not listed by frequency. Not listed by 3rdperson singular. Not listed by infinitive. Listed by TIME! Here’s the basic format – an 8 x 4 column table which I’ll try to recreate here for publishing on the blog. But note I’ve also included a doc for you to view:
SER / to be
Ayer Hoy Mañana
Yo era soy voy a ser
Tú eras eres vas a ser
Él/ella era es va a ser
Nosotros/as éramos somos vamos a ser
Ellos/ellas eran son van a ser
I noted that both the formal You (Ud.) and the Uds (you guys) forms were not there. When I inquired, the teacher said, simply, that these are both forms that were unnecessary to post. They aren’t used frequently enough in their setting.
I also noted that the verbs, all hi frequency verbs, were conjugated in the past tense that would be most frequently used. The preterite was used for verbs like decir – to say/tell, while the imperfect was used for verbs like querer – to want. Logical.
I’ve been using the verb wall posters from Scott Benedict’s site, teachforjune.com. But, only in the present tense (WHY? I DON”T KNOW!) I’m going to adapt these over spring break. It will be a better support for kids when navigating between and among tenses.
Grant
Ben again: My comment is that some teachers will think that this is too much information to post on the wall. But, if it can be laser pointed to at each use, it may be useful for some teachers. I prefer to indicate tense with gestures, personally, with the thumb over the shoulder for anything in the past and a two finger curve move of the hands out from the body for the future. My concern is that in order to do this processing the kids would have to leave the sound/unconscious processing/right brain/focus on the message and not the language realm to go into the realm of vision/conscious/left brain/focus on the words realm, but that is just my opinion and preference. I don’t think that the kids would get those tenses and I would like to see how it works in those classrooms where this is used. This is a good example of how wide and powerful this method is. Some of us may really get some mileage out of this idea, others not. It wouldn’t be the first time this has occurred with strategies in comprehension based instructional methods, and that is just fine. We take from this work what we want, since we are all individual teaching artists.