Saturday, December 13, 2014

Yes, Reading...

As I mentioned before, this is my first year in a new school and I am very lucky to have all of my colleagues excited and determined to transition from traditional teaching to CI / TPRS.  It has been a very hectic but fun school year so far, and I am pleased to see the other teachers very happy with the results that they have gotten so far.  Our superintendent, principal and school board are so excited with our program, that allowed us to sell all of our textbooks to get funds and buy short novels to structure our courses!  Ah, we also got a grant and added district funds to go (yes, the four of us!) to Washington this coming summer for NTPRS15!  I am VERY lucky.
Anyway, with everything that the transition entitles, we have been successful in implementing the change, and have dedicated pretty much all of the first semester to TPRS and Movie Talks.  Finally, we got our first order: "Brandon Brown quiere un perro" by Carol Gaab.  
Before we began reading the novel, students' speed-writes had been successful as far as showing fluency development.  However, I had about 90 percent of students misspelling "quiere" (wants).  Only a few students did it correctly.  We began the novel this past Monday and on Wednesday, after reading two chapters, I had them write a summary, speed-write style (7 minutes, without use of notes or any kind of help). In the past, I had students read this novel after the second week of school... this is the first time that I take so long to do it.   I knew that reading improves spelling and polishes language, I knew it... but I had not proven it so dramatically to myself until now.  The process (as we say in México) completely "flipped the tortilla!" Out of my group of 35-8th grade students only FIVE misspelled QUIERE! Unbelievable.  Somehow, I thought that the improvement would be a bit more gradually...  Also worth to mention, it was not a coincidence that the students that didn't improve spelling of that word were the ones that I had to remind every few minutes to "please, read along!".  The fact is that after almost a semester of CI, all of my students can understand the book without a problem, that is why they were not feeling the need to read along to follow the plot.  As I explained to them, reading this book will reinforce what they have learned, enhance their listening skills, help them ACQUIRE some new vocabulary, polish their sentence structure, SPELLING and grammar in general.  I am thrilled to have the budget that we got thanks to the selling of our textbooks, and we are in the process of getting all of our novels for this year.  In our order so far are "Robo en la noche", (by Kristi Placido), "Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto", "El Nuevo Houdini", "Felipe Alou", "Esperanza", "Vida y muerte en la Mara Salvatrucha" and "La hija del sastre", all can be found at http://tprstorytelling.com/