Skip to main content
winnipegand-a-spanish-demo-chris-jennifer-storyboard.jpg

Winnipeg...and a Spanish demo!

September 25, 2015

Hello, world, from the great city of Winnipeg! I am having so much fun on vacation exploring Winnipeg working here in Manitoba with a group of German teachers. Different than in the U.S., Spanish is not the most commonly taught world language in Canada, and so I was able to do a demo IN SPANISH and still give teachers the experience of sitting through a TPRS® lesson in a language that they don't understand. YES! My confidence in the power and efficacy of Comprehensible Input is reaffirmed every time that I have the opportunity to sit in on a Russian lesson by Michele Whaley, or a Chinese lesson by Linda Li, or a Japanese lesson with Victoria Gellert. Being able to understand a text in a language that I didn't speak at all an hour prior is THRILLING! I feel so smart!!! And I want to my students to feel that way, too.

So today for the demo, we worked on the target structures "wants to go" (quiere ir), "talks/speaks" (habla), and "hay" (there is/there are). Everyone drew a picture of somewhere that they wanted to go, and I used that as a prop for PQA. We spent most of our time talking about Linda who wanted to go to the mountains. There are mountains in Canada and Alaska, but of course she wanted to go to the mountains in Austria so that she could speak German (with Arnold, but unfortunately, he wasn't in Austria--he was in California). In a real class with more time, we could have spent days talking about all of the different places that people want to go, but for the sake of time we jumped into this reading about Chris and Jennifer:

If we had had more time, we would have done a round of simultaneous acting after the read-aloud with groups of four (playing the roles of Chris, Jennifer, Ignacio, and Carolyn) in order to get another repetition of the story, and then we could have wrapped up with a Blind Retell à la Betsy Paskvan. In the file (which you can download by clicking on the image above), a storyboard and a page-long story are included for your students to use during the Blind Retell.

Feel free to use this in your classes! If you want to use it in a demo for other teachers, please just check with me via email first. I'll be unavailable for presentations for some time (after the birth of my DAUGHTER!!!!!!!!), and I'd love for other people to make use of the materials. When you email me to ask for permission, I can also send an editable file that you can adapt for your audience (my story was about Winnipeg since it's awesome and that's where I am!).

Happy teaching and reading!

Join our newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter and get instant access to 150+ free resources for language teachers.

Subscribe Today