best of Ben from moreTPRS on transitioning from PQA to story

In PQA, I always try to remember to take the first bit of information that lends itself to being bent into something weird and I go with it. I push it, if I have to, but generally, if the kids are doing their job of supplying cute answers, and if I am doing my job of circling creative questions, we can quickly get into something interesting.

This means that if I found out during PQA that Jenny has two guinea pigs, I just leave the direct questioning of Jenny and instead ask the class about these rodents. Jenny is too “close” to her little darlings to make up weird stuff about them.

But the class is not! So I would just stop the discussion about Jenny’s rodents, and start one about an imaginary rodent. We don’t want to offend Jenny. To heck with Jenny—talking to her is keeping everything unintentionally too real. I try instead with: Class, there was a guinea pig!

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from moreTPRS on classroom management

In regards to management, I always take the first two weeks to get to know my students, they get to know me,and we establish and practice procedures for almost everything. For example, there is a procedure for entering the classroom when one is tardy, there is a procedure for homework turn in, there is a procedure for transitions between activities. We practice all of them, several times, as research indicates that it takes 21 times of doing something to form a habit. We also do an activity about what respect looks like, sounds like, and feels like. I use the language generated from this activity all year. When redirecting student behavior I often ask students, What should respect sound like right now? What does respect look like right now?

Be prepared for lots of redirection.

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best results ever!

Although I have been using TPRS® for the past six years and have had excellent results, this year, I have had the best results ever in a level-one class! My Spanish 1s are learning at a far greater rate than ever before and have been understanding Spanish since day one!

All of this thanks to Ben Slavic’s “Circling with Balls.”

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data recovery