One Word TPRS thoughts

I decided to play around with One Word TPRS in some of my classes today. I discovered a couple of things. First, when you start with a noun, don’t say “Hay un ____” [there is a ____]. The reason is that later when you ask how many of the noun there is/are they will always [...]

Class if flying by

It amazes me how quickly class goes. It used to go fast before, but now it really flies. The great thing is that I have so much that I can do and I haven’t even been moving that fast through circling with sports balls. I think that I may be spending too much time on [...]

At first

At first when I started teaching, I thought that I was messing kids up because I was not following the school curriculum. At times, I felt like my students were getting behind and in some ways they were, but at least they were actually learning Spanish.
Now, I don’t feel like my kids are behind at [...]

Did they really learn it?

Today I had my students do the first chart of my wall charts. Since they are level 2 kids, they should know a lot of it already, right? It was simple vocabulary, but they could not remember most of the words. So, I am going to go through the words with them. I will be [...]

Freaking Out

I had a student freak out a little today when I told her that we are not taking notes in class. I knew that she was concerned because she was used to the old system of cramming in order to get a grade that doesn’t correctly reflect the actual acquisition. I know that she will [...]

Unannounced Quizzes

I told my classes that I have unannounced quizzes, but I don’t think that all of them believed me. I am curious to see how this will change how much some of them pay attention and I realize that I need to enforce this rule more on this rule more. I know that I will [...]

Keeping it Personalized

I have discovered that it is essential that a language is personalized. As soon as I start talking about something that they are not interested in I begin to loose them. When I add a new detail, it sparks the interest again. I need get better at circling so that I don’t loose the kids [...]

Having fun acquiring

Today, I had a lot of fun with the students, but more importantly I was speaking in Spanish almost the entire time. I have never done that in class and it feels so liberating. I feel like my kids are learning more Spanish than ever and I am wondering how the rest of the year [...]

Following the rules

I realized today that rules are brilliant when you enforce them. It can be easy for teachers to just let it slide, but today in class I really enforced the rules. When I did this, it wasn’t in a harsh way. I simply just stated the rule to class when I saw that someone was [...]