This is a great activity to use in order to (1) get more reps and (2) give your students critical thinking practice. It works best as a whole-group/discussion activity as opposed to an assessment because the discussion is the most valuable component–that’s where students are honing their critical thinking skills. However, you could absolutely use…
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Conversation Re-Write
In Chapter 3 of Pobre Ana, Ana meets Susana and they talk for about five pages about all sorts of interesting things. However, they manage to do it in an extremely un-interesting way. Today, my students’ assignment was to re-write their conversation (using false information, if desired) so that it was interesting. This could be…
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Same and Different
This is a great reading activity that will give students experience with ‘testing vocabulary’ and require them to use higher levels of thinking. You could also use it as a listening activity, but you’d probably want to have done it with a reading first since the immediacy of listening would make it more challenging. Begin…
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Story Reps
I finally remembered to do the awesome activity that Betsy shared at our last monthly TPRS gathering, and it was incredibly successful! Here are the steps that we completed leading up to the re-tell: We created a class story (one class did ¡Siéntate! and another did ¡Saca el boleto!) I typed an abbreviated (bare bones)…
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Expanding a writing piece
This makes for a great activity to include in sub plans or a filler activity, and is a way for students to create their own embedded reading. Begin with a short story without many details. I usually type up one of my student’s Free Writes and give them credit for it at the top of…
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QAR
Note: I first heard about QAR in a workshop with Carol Gaab during our 2011 AFLA Conference. I began to dig into it and published this post soon thereafter. Imagine my surprise when my principal brought in consultant Susan Van Zant just two weeks after I published it, announcing to the staff that this would…
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Class Storybook Illustration
After every class story that we tell (well, at least every story that isn’t totally lame), I like to have the class make a storybook to add into the class library. They are great to have when students stop in with friends or come in for conferences with their parents. I made 10, 14, and…
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New Versions
Blind Retell
Betsy Paskvan shared this fantastic activity with our Anchorage PLC last Friday night. (For any of you that haven’t heard of Betsy, she the an amazing Japanese teacher in our district that co-taught a Contrastive Grammar session at NTPRS with Susie Gross this past summer.) I love this activity because it is simple and…
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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…
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