I am reading TPRS with Chinese characteristics: making students fluent and literate through comprehensible input by Terry Waltz and I am learning a great deal! I definitely recommend this book if, like me, you want your learners to truly develop fluency and proficiency in another language and on the other hand you do not consider yourself advanced in TPRS and comprehensible input,
How to get students engaged and producing a lot of language???? Well…. I recommend purchasing Martina Bex 7-day lesson plans about Los niños prisioneros de Bolivia as it is truly worth the investment! Not only did it save me a lot of prep-time, it also made my students had a meaningful discussion in the target language!
This story comes from the wonderful Martina Bex who posts so many brilliant ideas and resources on her blog. I started a new unit with my grade 6 class which is about going shopping and this story fitted perfectly!
Speaking/vocabulary: I first started by introducing the different shops to my students using this slideshow: SHOPS.
Here is another story script which follows the last story about Elena trying to apologize to Pedro. This time Elena offers a present to Pedro and he has to open different packages. The focus is on the difference between “¿Por qué?
Here is another story script which follows the last story about little Pedro losing his notebook. This story has lots of repetitions to focus on “lo siento” and “no sé qué hacer“. I am telling those stories using wooden ice cream sticks which the students love.
I am huge fan of the Michel Thomas method. The only thing that is bothering me is that it hugely relies on translation. I was trained to use the target language as much as possible in the classroom and my mentor taught me a few tricks to get the students to understand me in the target language like using lots of cognates.