New Focus

I've had a few insights over the past few days that have given me new focus for how I want to develop my curriculum:

First, I was reminded of one of the things I learned during my first week of student teaching:
LU+R=S  which means Listening and Understanding + Repetition = Spanish

With more educator-type terms, I can rephrase this to say:
CI+R=A i.e. Comprehensible Input + Repetition = Acquisition

How did this help?  Because, while I've been focusing on comprehensible input, I forgot to account for repetition.  I was getting frustrated trying to pull structures directly from the Pobre Ana novels because, while they have plenty of repetition, it isn't presented in a format that is simplified or repetitive enough to foster language acquisition like I want to.  There is a step missing between learning new vocabulary and being able to apply it in that more complex context.

I've found that step by going back to using the LICT extended stories.  These stories are built upon one another, structure by structure.  Through reading them, students receive the repetition and spiraled material that fosters acquisition.  However, the teachers guide unfortunately doesn't match up with the readings as well as I'd like, so I'm back to developing structures and stories for LICT that I can use and really feel like my students are getting what they need.

So then that leaves me to decide how I'm going to incorporate my novellas into my curriculum - though, in my last post, I discussed that to quite an extent.  Simply put, I'm going to reserve the last two weeks of the semester for reading novels, which works quite well into the other things I have planned.  In a nutshell, I'm going to design my curriculum like this:

• 7 weeks of TPRS and culture instruction, including all assessments, based on the LICT extended stories and structures pulled from them.
• 2 weeks of novella reading, during which I collect notebooks for grading (since students won't be using them!) and finalize everything before the end of the quarter

It seems simple enough to me, and I'm almost done developing my structures.  Once that's done, the next step will be writing stories, developing PQA questions, and creating materials (I can't wait to make more Inklewriter stories!)  During all of this, I'm creating an Interactive Notebook that corresponds with my curriculum as an example for students and for me to really think it through.  Things are starting to really come together!