A classroom like none other

Sometimes I have to smile to myself wondering about my students' reaction this fall when the walk into my classroom.  It's going to be like nothing they've ever experienced before.  And, I'm glad it's my own and I have a lot of freedom with a supportive administration because I'm sure it'd give many teachers a heart attack.  Who in their right mind would have a Flipped TPRS classroom with Genius Hour?

• Though it's a language class, we will not focus on grammar.
• We will be telling and acting out stories in a chaotic manner.
• My class decorations include many toys and costumes you'd expect in a child's bedroom.
• Students will learn the most important material at home, and then come to school to talk and interact.
• Then, once a week, they get free reign to learn about whatever they want to.

Maybe I've gone off the deep end.  But doesn't it take just a little bit of crazy for progress and innovation to occur?

Embedded Reading

In my efforts to flip my classroom, I've been trying to think of an effective way to prepare my students for the reading days.  I wanted to find something that they could read (since that's what they're preparing to do), but that would be easy enough that they could be successful on their own.  I was having some trouble until....

I discovered embedded reading!  This is something that I've been hearing about every now and then without actually understanding what it was.  Initially, I thought it was something like supplemental reading - different texts that would support the themes and concepts in a main text, much like was done in both my US and Latin American history and literature classes.  I decided to finally take a look and see what all the fuss was about.  I found this wonderful blog, Embedded Reading, that set me straight (it's now added to my blog list on the side panel of this page).

The blog is very thorough about them and I highly recommend heading on over to it, but I'll write a brief explanation here.  Rather than different texts focusing on a particular theme, embedded readings are essentially the same text, but with various levels created for it that are embedded in one another.  The first level is easy enough for anyone in the class to read and understand without effort.  Then, each of the following levels has more detail and elaboration, making the text more complex and difficult, until students are reading a text that would generally be difficult, but not impossible for them.  However, because students already have background knowledge about the text that was easily understood at previous levels, students are better able to understand the more complex levels o the text.  It's scaffolding!

This is the answer to my reading preparation days :)  I want to use these in two ways:

Extended Reading - This will be pretty straightforward as I take the Look, I Can Talk! extended stories and create easier levels for them.  I imagine I'll probably make 3 levels for each story using the "top down" approach (starting with the hardest text and simplifying it):  The hardest will be what is actually written in the Look, I can talk! textbook, while the easiest will be what I have students read at home as part of my "flipped" classroom.  I can see various activities we could do in class to read both the "middle" and "highest" levels.  Since I'll be scaffolding them appropriately, I can easily see us being able to read the stories as a whole class, in groups, and even individually with me there to support them.  One thing I do enjoy doing - especially for independent and group reading - is to have students ask me what unknown words mean and I can write them on the board with their definitions in order to support the entire class at once.

Storytelling/writing - I like this idea to support both reading and writing.  After we tell a story, the students' homework and preparation for the next day is to rewrite the story told in class.  From the stories submitted, I can choose three to edit and type for students to read the next day - one that's basic, another that's a little more difficult, and one that's advanced.  (Another idea I have to support students' writing, especially at first, is to provide a "skeleton story" where students can just fill in the blank to re-write their story, which would be at the basic level).  Then, students can read and re-read the stories they and their peers wrote!

Spanish 1 Curriculum

I finally have a draft of my curriculum with general year-long ans weekly plans.  I've updated the "curriculum" tab above to link to this curriculum.  Now, I'm going to go back and work on resources and individual lesson plans.  I'll update here when I make progress!

Flipped Classroom: Week 1 Student Resources

I'm working on my curriculum and putting it together nicely for myself and others to use!  I've decided to use my Weebly site for organization.  I'm still working on getting together lesson plans, but I do have a nice webpage completed that students will refer to in order to prepare themselves for class in the "flipped classroom" model.  Essentially, I've given students a preview of what we will be learning the next day, including the vocabulary, the topics we will discuss, and the objectives and activities that will be completed in-class.  I intend to count these activities as part of the "citizenship" objective in my class have most of these activities submitted via EdModo, where I (or Edmodo) can quickly assign and keep track of grades.

Now that I'm actually developing resources and plans and am able to visualize more concrete details, I'm even more excited about flipping my classroom.  This gives me a whole new level of integrating technology into my classroom and opening up opportunities for learning.  In addition, by using various resources, they are able to come to class prepared to contribute, facilitating a classroom where I can be a guide on the side and allow them to share and elaborate on what they already know from resources they can get on their own.  I also feel that this will help students develop the research and other skills necessary to succeed in the future, with particular attention to success in an technology-driven world.

Flipping my TPRS classroom

This is an idea I've been letting fester in my head for a long time, and the other day I cam across a cool graphic shared on Twitter that really got me going (see below).  Being the "idea" person that I am, I'm very intrigued on the idea of a flipped classroom, and I think it's very possible with TPRS.  Why might I want to do this?  I think that by flipping the TPRS classroom, I will have more time to engage students with more authentic and organic CI.  Essentially, if I can give students basic CI before class begins, I can provide more advanced CI when they're with me to practice!  With my students, they won't get the kind of practice (Including correct modeling) they can with me anywhere else - but I believe they can receive basic CI if done properly on their own - so I'd like to make the most of the time they have with me.  I would really like to give this a shot this upcoming year.  Luckily, I have a few advantages when it comes to some of the barriers that most teachers run into.

First and foremost, I've got time on my side right now to plan this all out.  One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in flipping your classroom is making sure students have the materials they'd need in order to come to class prepared.  Given that I'm subbing now, am only committed from 3-5pm each day during the summer, and don't have a lot of other things to attend to (like a kid), I'm sure I'll be able to come up with the resources I need for next year.  Plus, I can be a little obsessive over stuff like this (i.e. my class haha).

Second, many educators are concerned about students having access to technology at home to study.  I don't think that will be a problem at Somerset :)

So how am I going to do it?

1. What am I going to teach? Given that I want to take advantage of all the time I have now, I need to have a clear idea of what I'm going to teach during the year.  I just finished writing all my structures and am pretty happy with them!
2. How Am I going to teach it? This will determine the types of materials that will best prepare my students for class each day.  I know that I'm going to have a rough weekly outline of doing PQA, storytelling, and reading - with some other stuff like culture and novel-reading mixed in.
3. What materials will my students need?  This is the big one - and what I'm going to focus on now.  In order to flip my classroom, students will need to get CI, CI, CI - at home without a native speaker.  They can't just take notes, and I won't just do a Youtube lecture.  Rather, here are my initial plans:
• Before PQA:
• List the structures for that lesson with their translation (possibly hidden for them to bring up), as well as an audio clip so students can hear how they sound.
• Provide the PQA questions with possible appropriate responses.  Give them the opportunity to create their own responses (which they can send to me through Edmodo).
• Based on what they send me, I'll know how well they comprehended the vocabulary and where I'll need to start with them.
• Before storytelling:
• Give them a very short and simple short reading (with audio) to do - on Inkelwriter!
• I also want to create storytelling videos that students can hear and see the video. (Since these basically achieve the same goal, students could choose which format they like best?)
• Since I'll be writing "skeleton" stories as part of my lesson planning to guide my storytelling, I could just provide these to my students!
• Based on the reading, they can give me a brief summary showing how well they understood this "skeleton" story.
• Based on how well they comprehend the story, I know whether I need to re-teach or if they're ready to move into full-fledged story-telling.
• After storytelling:
• Students can write a summary of the class story to me in Spanish (they can use their notes and simply "fill-in-the-blank" - one that I'll edit and bring in for reading and discussion the next day.
• For speaking, we could even use Google Voice for students to record themselves telling the story!  Of course, we'd only do that when students were ready to start practicing speaking.
• Before extended reading:
• Students can read a similar story (with audio) and write a summary to demonstrate comprehension.
• Update: Embedded readings would be great!
• Before culture:
• Students can research the culture topic we'll be working on and bring their newfound knowledge to class to share.  This also facilitates preparing students for the future by using their resources to teach themselves!

Some of those ideas wrote themselves as I was creating this post.  I'm very excited to start creating all these support materials.  I imagine this will all come together as a website with everything on it - allowing students to go back and review/catch up as well as move ahead if they so desire.  Plus, maybe my husband will finally learn Spanish! - If I do this correctly, motivated students should realistically be able to teach themselves Spanish, using class time to elaborate, engage, and personalize.  And don't worry - I'll update when I get these going!

Check out this cool graphic about flipping your classroom: