1st - 4th graders telling whole stories in Spanish, in front of the class? PNA students are challenged each day in their classes to take risks, display courage, and make mistakes, with the understanding that the classroom environment is a place where they can feel safe and supported to learn from those experiences. Screwing something up yourself can be a great opportunity to learn that they way you did it was incorrect, and you will do better next time. Seeing a friend screw up, and watching them both not be emotionally defeated and use it as an opportunity to learn and do it the right way can be an even greater opportunity. Learning by doing is a process fraught with small failures, which is exactly what children need to experience in order to be successful. The PNA Spanish program is engineered specifically with these ends in mind -- get students comfortable enough with new words and phrases that they will feel OK getting up in front of everyone to use them, and let them do it themselves and make their own mistakes to learn from. The students know from the first week of Spanish class that using new Spanish and making mistakes is the only way that the class can earn double "fiesta minutos" -- minutes toward a class party. If the class can together collect 45 minutos -- the length of one class -- then to the fiesta it shall be! Students are intrinsically motivated to "give it a shot," even if they are not confident that they will do it just right. Children need to know that it is OK and even encouraged to mess up sometimes. Nobody ever got any better at skiing by staying on the bunny slope week after week! Using the TPRS method, students added the creative details to a Spanish story focused around the "Egg Drop" project that the 2nd graders recently completed. If you'd like to know more about TPRS, click the button below: The target structures for the story were:
PONE - puts TIRA - throws ROMPE - breaks SOBREVIVE - survives HUEVO - egg The students decided who participated, ranging from teachers to other students to Star Wars characters to pop stars. They decided what each participant put their egg in for the toss, who threw the contraptions from the roof, and whether each egg broke or survived. Once the story was complete and drawn on the board, students interacted with it in various ways - answering circling questions about the story, making up their own 5th participant's details, drawing the story themselves, reading a written version, and finally re-telling the story to the class based just on the pictures on the board. The video above shows a smattering of PNA's wonderful Lower School students (grades 1-4, in this case) re-telling their classroom stories. Some were nearly perfect, some were far from it, but every last one got to the purpose of what the class does - takes risks, tries out new skills, and feels safe learning in a community. Comments are closed.
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Specialist & Enrichment Teachers Archives
February 2021
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