I simplified the story script I wrote about little Pedro losing his notebook to focus on “¿Dónde está?”, “No lo sé” and “es importante para…“. I also changed the ending to make it more surprising and funnier to my students.
This school year I started to tell more stories TPRS style. I got no training at all so I do my own thing which seems to work well. I invent stories which are fun to listen to and easy to understand even for Spanish beginners. I already wrote some of the stories when I was on maternity leave and I used them with grade 6 and 7.
I have just come across Bryan Kandel’s website and he has highlighted a few useful web tools to use in the classroom. One of them is Textivate which is Taskmagic web-based little brother. Ten years ago, when I started teaching Taskmagic was the one software we used in the classroom and language teachers just loved it!
Last night I read the post Why you should write daily by Leo Babauta. My maternity leave is soon coming to an end and when I look back at what I wanted to achieve when I started it last December and where I am now, I feel like I didn’t do much (apart from giving birth to a lovely little boy of course!
I am at the planning stage for when I go back to school in August. This time I have decided to plan for more creative projects as they allow for a lot of comprehensible output and they get students engaged and enthused. The immigration project I did with grade 7 last year turned out to be a positive experience so I have decided to follow the same pattern.
As Kevin Mclaughlin mentionned in his great post Set learning free in 100 words, we as teachers should “try not to overplan, forget the detail and be confident in changing direction as and where learning takes you.” This is exactly what I attempted to do with this project I set up last year with grade 7.