A Music-Centered Curriculum

Last year, I made an attempt to follow the curriculum in the newest Look, I can talk! books (Blaine Ray).  However, for various reasons, it just wasn't cutting it for me.  However, one thing that students were picking up really well were the songs.  Along with the LICT curriculum, I did activities with LEGO stop-motion videos based on the original LICT stories and of course Señor Wolly (their favorite).  In fact one particular struggling student's mom purchased a school Señor Wooly account so that her son and the rest of my students could access the videos!  Students were able to remember and use the phrases because they got the songs stuck in their head and enjoyed singing them as well as associated the words with the videos that accompanied the songs.  After getting some feedback from students, I decided mid-year to re-do my curriculum and have the songs at the heart of the curriculum.  In other words, my structures were pulled from the songs and listening to the songs became a central part of instruction.  Unfortunately, due to various circumstances, I wasn't able to plan this curriculum shift out methodically and it showed, but it also showed how much the students were learning.  However, the 2014-2015 school year will have a music-based curriculum that I feel will be much stronger and I can't wait to see the results.  Here's how I went about structuring it:

First, I used Bryce Hedstrom's list of the 400 most common words to identify the words that I wanted my students to know.  Then, I looked at various songs from both of the previous resources as well as songs commonly used by other Spanish teachers, including authentic songs (for example, "Eres Tú" is an excellent first-year song!).  I identified prominent phrases within the songs (usually they were repeated multiple times, giving me lots of repetition and increasing the likelihood that students would know them) and cross-checked that they included high-frequency vocabulary and/or important grammatical concepts that I wanted my students to be exposed to and acquire (in the lower levels, phrases with high-frequency vocabulary were emphasized while grammar gained increasing importance with the higher levels since they already know many of the high-frequency words and have acquired more fluency).  I also ensured that the phrases were in a complete sentence (or were put into a complete sentence with minor adjustments) and that I could come up with a discussion topic with which I could PQA, circle, discuss, and/or tell a story with.

In Intro to Spanish and Spanish 1 classes (which are very similar) have a very well laid-out curriculum, especially since I've taught these levels before and know where to start/end up, what my resources are, and the general strengths and pitfalls of particular phrases and songs.  Ultimately, I decided to leave my Spanish 2/3 classes (I have both levels in the same class) a little more flexible and identified a loose order of songs to do with them and will select specific phrases as we go (these students are generally more proficient than a regular Spanish 2 class since they've had Spanish all through elementary school, Intro to Spanish, Spanish 1, and for some Spanish 2, as well as being at a high-performing school and they take Spanish as their elective over other options; thus, the majority of what I'm doing is practice, practice, practice and just help them become more fluent since they are already conversational and this is the first time I'm teaching these levels).  The phrases are what students will be tested on, but as all Comprehensible Teachers know, they will know so much more than just those phrases.

In addition to centralizing my curriculum on these phrases, I'm doing "Verb Karate" with my Spanish 2-3 students, doing someting called "Algo Más" each Friday, and putting an emphasis on reading.

• Verb Karate is similar to the activities on Conjuguemos.com and will help them start solidifying their knowledge of grammar.  I'm going to directly teach a verb form once and then review it for a week or two before teaching the next form.  Students simply need to demonstrate that they can conjugate the verb endings (which will be available to them during the test) correctly by completing a conjugation quiz pulled straight from Conjuguemos every other week.  I expect them to earn 5 "belts" per semester, though there will be a surprise for students who earn all 15 "belts".  I'll write more about Verb Karate at a later date.
• "Algo Más" is simply that - "Something more".  These are a variety of topics that I don't cover nor test in my regular curriculum (though they might be a "bonus" question).  Some of these are vocabulary-based (head, shoulders, knees, and toes), some are culture-based (the countries and capitals of Spanish-Speaking countries), and some are just an additional fun way to get CI (learning a song that didn't fit into the curriculum but that students enjoy).
• With reading, students will be doing free-choice reading Monday-Thursday (further reinforcing their command of high-frequency vocabulary) and whole-class reading with me on Thursdays.  The whole-class reading for lower levels will come from Blaine Ray's New LICT books since they provide short stories and activities that go with them based on high-frequency vocabulary.  The higher levels will read more authentic resources from Spanish and Latin American literature as well as current events.  I worked out a 5-step process for students to complete these readings in groups (context, pre-reading questions, brief summary, embedded reading, and post-reading questions), especially since I'll be teaching both my Spanish 2 and Spanish 3 classes separately at the same time (thank goodness they're my more responsible and advanced kids!).  Again, I'll write more about these activities in a future post.

That's basically my curriculum in a nutshell!

PS - I'll update soon with the actual songs and structures I chose.

Spanish Reading Materials

I'm working on building a library for my students to read from.  With a focus on Comprehensible Input and minimizing frustration, I plan for students to select their free-choice reading material from my library or to purchase their own books (giving them even more choice and flexibility) from an extensive list of leveled reading resources.  These resources I'm suggesting come from the novels popular with TPRS teachers, short stories (again from TPRS resources as well as my own), carefully selected popular novels that students should be able to read, and authentic resources that include embedded readings and context for students to understand them.  I'll help guide students to what best fits their level and interests, allowing for considerable differentiation and flexibility in choice.  Of course, if students have something they REALLY want to read, then their motivation can overcome the difficulty of the book and it's still valuable, but most students find that my recommendations are usually the most enjoyable since they feel more capable of reading them.

Below are "Amazon Wish Lists" of the books I plan on recommending to my students.  These were compiled based on what's available through Blain Ray, TPRS Publishing, and Susan Gross's list of Spanish novels.

Middle School Spanish (Intro to Spanish)
Spanish 1
Spanish 2
Spanish 3
Spanish 4
Spanish 5
Spanish 6

Additionally, I am selecting authentic resources from NMSU's reading list for students in their Spanish Literature Master's degree list.  Almost all of the items other than the books (they're formatted correctly, so books titles are all underlined) are in the public domain, so you can easily find them online.  These can be very challenging, so I'm making these available to students to read if they want (there's some wonderful poetry and enlightening essays!).  I will be teaching some of these to my Spanish III students separate from free-choice reading as well.

On a side note, I'm trying to raise funds to purchase many of these books so that students have more selection in my classroom.  If you'd like to donate, please visit my GoFundMe page: http://www.gofundme.com/ba121w (I will love you forever if you do!)

Authentic Resources and TPRS

Just read a great blog post from Kristy Placido on the use of authentic resources in a TPRS curriculum.    Without repeating too much of what she had to say, I wanted to express my thoughts on the subject.

I believe that authentic resources in a language classroom is important - inasmuch as they are comprehensible.  Bottom line is that students won't learn anything from something they cannot understand.  To promote language acquisition, I use my leveled readers as the core of my curriculum.  This upcoming year, we're going to use the Pobre Ana series along with the New LICT extended readers to form our curriculum.  These contain the most important words and structures need to learn to get started, and giving them materials that they can fully understand - mostly on their own - is a powerful learning experience.  In the end, Spanish is still Spanish, whether it comes from me or an "authentic" material.

Because students are learning the most common and important structures and phrases, they should be able to find them in authentic resources as well.  Ultimately, students should be ready to read and listen to these resources in a comprehensible way.  At first, that may include authentic stories that I present, as Kristy described:

For instance, if I want to discuss a news story, I might show my students an article or a short video about it (in Spanish). However, if the items are incomprehensible, I might use them primarily as a visual and speak about them myself in simpler language, focusing on a small amount of new vocabulary, relying on cognates, visuals, and previously-acquired vocabulary, and using very natural grammar and syntax. For higher-level classes, I might even type up an “embedded reading” in which I simplify the story for reading/discussion prior to delving in to the authentic resource.

I'm lucky enough to be working in a school where students have more than the "usual" amount of Spanish instruction and will be beginning high school with already three years of daily Spanish instruction with a CI curriculum.  I believe this will enable me to take the highest level classes another step forward and use authentic resources as the core of my curriculum, similar to the literature books we used in my college-level classes.  Of course, this will often have some sort of scaffolding to prepare the for the structures and vocabulary used in the material.  It'll be a few years before we have students at that level, but I'm very excited to see where this might lead in the years to come!