My level 1 and 2 stories (for Bethanie, and whomever else)

A little while ago I made a post about pleasure reading that elicited a few comments from Bethanie:

Bethanie said...

Could you elaborate on what you do with the reading guides/palabras claves? I would like to incorporate more long reading into my classes in addition to the shorter pieces I already use, but struggle with some of the same things you mentioned.

Also, if you could select books for levels 1 and 2, what would you pick?

Thanks!

24 November, 2009 21:08

Sarita said...

Hi Bethanie! Now I just hand the students the guides/palabras claves and they turn them in on the due date. A couple of tips that are important, I think, are 1) to reduce frustration, read together at first to teach them how to find the important things without looking up every word (make sure you understand subject/verb, leave the sentence as soon as you have the gist of it, leave the paragraph as soon as you have the gist, understand every part of a sentence when you know the answer to a ? is there); 2) give them the page numbers of the answers to the questions and make sure they're chronological; 3) give a list of high-frequency words from the chapter that they're not likely to know; and 4) rehash the chapter in a TPRS/circling way when they turn in the guide to gauge who understood what.
As for books for lower levels, have you seen the TPRS books by Blaine Ray et al? You can start here. Good luck!

25 November, 2009 16:07

Bethanie said...

Hi Sarita,
Thanks for your response. I have a few of the Blaine Ray novels, and I think they are a great idea to consider. I find teaching this type of reading to be a greater challenge at the lower levels (1-2) than at the upper levels (3+), so I appreciate the ideas that you've shared.

01 December, 2009 22:47

When I first started giving my students stories with comprehension questions as assessment, I remember wishing there were more available for free on the internet, especially for lower-level students. I'm still not aware of anyone publishing or offering such stories on the internet, but at least I'd like to offer mine to Bethanie and anyone else who wants to use them. A few notes about them:
1-I believe that students pay more attention with a lower affective filter (and therefore acquire more) if the stories are interesting, funny, weird, or all of the above.
2-Long stories are frustrating so none is longer than 1 page.
3-Sorry for any mistakes/misprints. Feel free to make them your own.
4-They deliberately use vocabulary my students learned in that particular quarter. You may want to replace words to match your students' vocabulary.
5-The stories that are one page long with questions on the other page, I scored as tests.
6-There are a couple of stories I wrote for them to answer questions on (quiz grade) and then they filled in blanks with different details to make the story their own (daily grade) and exchanged with another student(s) who answered the questions based on the new story (quiz grade).

Level 1 stories
Level 2 stories

Hope you find them useful!

Good stories for commands

Here are a couple of good stories to use when teaching commands.

En aquel prado is a book I actually start using the first week of Spanish 1 to practice numbers, but the best use of it is for commands. The most repetition is in uds and nosotros commands, although with the first animal there is a tú command. Fun to get a little loco with and make animal noises and change your voice for the baby animals. What happens is, the mom tells the babies (in increasing numbers) to do something, and then they all say "Let's ----!" Wonderfully repetitive.

¡Muy bien, Fergus! is a good one for tú commands. Everyone can relate with trying to train a dog. There are a good 5 or 6 commands in there, at least. And it's cute. :)

Incidentally, if you can put up with RBD, their Pepsi commercial from Christmas before last also has a lot of tú commands. And telling RBD's story to teenagers is always fun & funny. Univision has a couple of good videos showing teenagers marching in protest, in tears, against their breakup. SO funny.

A good story for 'tiene'

Usborne books has a series of books that are good to read when practicing tiene. I bought a couple to use with my baby--one is Este no es mi osito and the other is Este no es mi dinosaurio. They're touch 'n feel board books, but they work fine in a classroom too! The things that the osito and dinosaurio have are low-frequency (some I didn't know) but the statement/reason sequence of 'este no es mi osito'/'tiene' was easy enough for my Spanish 1 students to comprehend as soon as we started tiene, and the pictures make it clear what the rest of the sentence means. My targets were no es and tiene anyway, so I didn't care if they remembered how to say "shiny spines."

Incidentally, the little mouse is in a different spot on every page, so it's perfect to practice prepositions of place. I ask, "¿Dónde está el ratoncito?" and they tell me, "Debajo de la boca del dinosaurio" or whatever. Fun times!

A story for demonstratives

I've come up with a story that in both Spanish 1 and 2 has worked really well with teaching demonstratives. We've worked with those quite a bit for the past couple of weeks, and I've been amazed at how fast my students have become consistent and proficient at using them.

Side note: A couple of veteran Spanish teachers and I were talking recently, and they were remarking how 1/2 hour once per week (our middle school Spanish schedule) is a complete waste of time. I said I thought it was of some benefit, because I could see how my Spanish 1 students came in to my class after 3 years of that schedule and were advanced in their ability to use verbs like soy and estoy. One of the teachers said, "Oh, you can teach that in two days."
Yes, you can teach it in two days. But the students will not use it consistently accurately after that. They just flat won't. This is what's wrong with us--we care more about moving through material than we do about whether our students can use the material. I had a Spanish 3 student with very high aptitude write yo tiene on his blog last week and I could have smacked him. What is our goal here, finishing a book? Assigning a grade? Or enabling them to communicate with hundreds of millions of people who have something to teach them about life and the world?

Okay, so the story:

There is a girl, her name is Goldilocks, she has blond hair and she's however old the students decide (reviewing beginner phrases). She's wearing a (color) dress. Is she sad? No, she's happy. She has a friend, her friend is an animal, he's a little bear, and his name is Charlie.

(I draw these two on the left side of the board, and then draw three long arcs at about equal widths across the board to indicate space close to them, a bit farther, and farthest away.)

Goldilocks wants lots of things. Charlie has lots of things in his house. Charlie offers her these things. Goldilocks wants soup. Charlie says, 'Do you want this soup'? Does Goldilocks want this soup? No, this soup is too hot. (repeat for that soup, which is too cold) (repeat for that soup over there, which is perfect)
(repeat for spoons--we say one for each hand just so we have it plural--two are too red, two are too green, and two are perfectly yellow, the color of her hair)
(repeat for bread--one is too big, another too small, the third just right)

We just did this in Spanish 1 because we're working on kitchen/food vocabulary, but you can use anything. In Spanish 2 we were working on dropping the noun to get esto, ésos, etc, and we used gorra, pantuflas, and something else that escapes me at the moment.

Believe it or not, once you've gotten high-schoolers to accept the fact that where a second language is concerned, they're like kindergarteners, they'll tolerate just about anything--including nursery rhymes!

A story test

My assessment has recently shaped up to be that I have 5 test grades in each quarter. We have a high school policy that except in math, tests form 50% of the student's grade, and daily grades the other 50%. So test grades are pretty important, and I've been accused of not having enough tests in a quarter before. This is because I hate paper tests. It's so hard for me to really assess what was going on in the student's head, communicatively, and assign a number value to it. But it's a requirement, so I suck it up. And figured out a way around it, sort of.
One test grade per quarter is a grammar-based test. (A Spanish 1 example is discussed in this post.)
One test grade is the accumulation of the semi-daily story quizzes. (These are six-to-twelve point quizzes given at the beginning of class to assess their comprehension of a. the question b. the story and c. their notes on the story.)
One test grade is their in-class participation (how much they listen, watch, talk, and focus).
One test grade is a communicative project.
And one test grade is a story test. I write a story using as much target vocabulary and features as my creativity will produce, ask a bunch of questions about it, and take that for a test grade.
The second quarter story test in Spanish 1 can be found here. It's about two kids who aren't at school because it's summer, so they decide to play for three hours in the water with their very clean dog, LJ. Then LJ is not so clean, so mom gets mad and LJ ends up in the bath. Everyone lives happily ever after, LOL.
I'll post Spanish 2 and 3 story tests soon.

Another Spanish 1 reading

Here's the story we did in Spanish 1 for the 2nd quarter. My version is about an elephant who wins the lottery and goes out shopping with his friend Minnie Ratoncita. In the student version, students collaborate to fill in blanks and make the story their own.

The questions they confused were the ones about how they went shopping and where they went. They at first confused the word cómo for dónde, but once they read the context and the following question, they ended up correcting it themselves. They did this with a sub while I was away at a conference, and by all reports didn't have any trouble with it. I'm so proud of them!

Spanish 1 Story: Insectos grises para el almuerzo

Here's my first Spanish 1 story, written using some of our vocab from the first quarter. This was right after we talked about colors and we hadn't done much on verb conjugations. (I hate the word conjugate and we don't spend much time memorizing or any time drilling conjugations.)

My story

Story with blanks so students can re-create the story