Teaching with TPR/TPRS in the Block

Many of the existing materials for TPR/TPRS are written for classrooms that see their students 5 days a week (i.e. vocab preview, story-telling, story-asking, embedded readings, writing day and novels). This can be more difficult to apply in the block, not to mention exhausting. Here is the overview of how I survive in the block.

My block set-up

My current school is set-up on an A B day block schedule where each class is an hour and twenty-five minutes. Each level of Spanish is one year (requiring passing at semester to continue).

I have taught in a 4x4 block, each class is an hour and a half (4 classes per day) and I saw them every day. A full year of language was done in one semester.

CI: Comprehensible Input

This is pedagogy. Students acquire language through meaningful input that they can understand. By keeping things within a clear frame of reference, students truly internalize meaning instead of rote memorization and rapid deterioration of vocabulary.

TPRS: Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling

This is methodology. This uses the idea of CI by labeling vocabulary “in-bounds” and using lots of repetitions to increase exposure and create true acquisition. This is done through readings, telling stories, reading novels, asking stories, and personalizing content to make it engaging for students.

Challenges

Using TPRS in a block can be exhausting. To keep students engaged for a whole block is innately a challenge. When you then take into account that TPRS pretty much requires you to be on point and turn into the crazy charades lady… I’ve never been called that (lie).

It is also hard to keep up a 5 cycle rotation when that takes two weeks, minimum, in your planning time (assuming no breaks or PD days, yay).

My Tips

I try to never let one focus in class last more than 25 minutes. Then we brain break, move seats, play a round of BANCO! (see post on time fillers here), something that shakes it up and gets their blood moving. *Exception: if we are MovieTalk-ing, story asking or telling and they are engaged and into it, we keep the momentum going. I had a handful of classes where the story asking lasted for the whole period and the bell rang at the very climatic ending. My quiet kid yelled  “Qué lástima” in protest. 

Read and write every day in some capacity; even if it is student work being peer-reviewed or read. This helps you transition and prepare for the next lesson or activity. Have them write a review of what just happened. Sometimes you need a break to get water to wet your whistle, or you need to find that class set of copies you made this morning and then set down over there, maybe?

Monthly self-talk is important, especially for the 1^st and 4^th years. Have students write themselves a note and file it away. Pass the notes back out at the end of the year. They can clearly reflect on their own progress. It is fun watching them become language snobs.

Don’t forget to make lesson plans. I know many teachers say things like “this seriously but down my planning time and paperwork”, “one day predicts the next”. I found that in the block, this is true to an extent. If I don’t have a plan, it is easy to feel “done” and let the last 20 minutes of class not be as impactful as they could be. Write those plans in a very short summary on the board to keep you on track. Here is a link to the free sample pages for my lesson planner I created to help me (there is a fully assembled version that runs August-June).

Set a timer or give a student the job of the clock watcher. They will help you remember to transition to the next thing (going from story-telling to writing to reading to oral summaries with a partner). If we need 5 or 10 minutes more, I just hold up one hand or two to my clock watcher and they know it is like hitting snooze.

Have back-up plans ready at all times. We all have that class that seems like a karmatic result of a wrong-doing from a past life. They drain you. Or, maybe you have a sick kid at home and you were so tired you left your coffee next to your lunch on the kitchen counter. If you practice certain activities or skills with your students, sometimes you can get them to self-direct a little better. Also having plans like this keep you from dipping into your sub-plans. 

Have themed days. These days are not related to a sequence of instructions, but rather to the “incentive break” of the day. If kids have you on Tuesday and Thursday of that week they can look forward to cloze listening or sometime of music and then game time.

Here are my theme days for my classroom. I love a good alliteration, it that is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

locura en lunes-We tend to play large-group games like BANCO!, board races, Simon Dice, Navegando, Spanish Partner Programming, Pasa el Bolo, and various others. Here is my post about whole class games that work for me. 

música martes- We do cloze listening activities (I keep a running doc folder with popular songs and lyrics pre-saved. This way I can blank-out vocabulary that related to our current stories, key words, or the frequent flyers and then print them as needed). I also let my upper levels, generally better relationship and I know if I can trust them, explore new music and report back (they draw a genre or country they have to look for).

muévete miércoles- I have always tried to find various dances to use as brain breaks but never thought to organize it. THEN, I went to the fantastic IWLA conference in 2014 where Allison Weinhold presented about baile viernes. I decided to jump in her conga line and organize mine midweek (it fits nicely with our early out days etc). If you are hesitant or worry about “wasting class time”, poohy. My kiddos haven’t noticed my dirty little secret: we start class with the dance, Zumba, or workout series (in Spanish) and then I never leave the TL and/or focus on difficult concepts (stressing grammar, addressing explicit grammar in English, pushing old vocabulary words, and requiring responses). They love it.

juego jueves- Depending on what the day looks like, they get 15-20 minutes to play games, in Spanish, with each other. Uno is super popular, my homemade Manzanas a Manzanas, conversation Jenga, Guess Who (I used one games and replaced the pictures with photos of other teachers), and Scrabble. They stay in Spanish; I expect it so they do it. If they veer off track, the time ends and we go back to normal class.

video viernes- Movie Talks are popular more frequently on these days. I also try to make their project work days fall on here. We have done music video analysis (pointing out landmarks, comparing the English version to the Spanish version, other cultural key points).