Team Responses

The Alaskans For Language Acquisition Conference was last weekend, and we were blessed to host five incredible speakers for the weekend (Carol Gaab, Terry Waltz, Laura Terrill, Hiroko Kataoka, and Uwe Kind). I spent much of my time in the sessions presented by Carol Gaab, president of TPRS Publishing, Inc., as three of them focused on reading. As always, Carol encourages teachers to constantly change (or rotate) the way that do everyday things in class. One of her strategies has had great success in my class in the four days that I've been back from the conference. Carol suggested dividing the class into groups (quadrants) and giving a title to each quadrant (could be colors, football teams, anything! Switch it up now and again.). I originally did this on Tuesday while we were reviewing a reading from the Friday before--I called on different quadrants to translate portions of the text. Well, it has snowballed from there and we now have quite an excellent competition going on! I call on the quadrants for everything--Which group can come up with the best gesture for a given term? Which group can deliver a line from the story with the most emotion? Which group can sing the loudest? I'm getting lots of added reps out of structures as groups repeat them for competition's sake, and it has added tons of energy to my classes. I just need to remember the original point that Carol was trying to make which was to keep things fresh and novel! Next week, I'll divide the class differently to create new teams, and give them different titles (probably universities, since it will be University Week.) Thanks Carol! U R D Best!! Totally not a jerak.