I know that there are lots of ways to teach the colors but the following technique has worked really well for me over the past few years and I thought that I would share it. I’m sure that I didn’t invent the wheel here, but it is something that just developed rather than my reading about it somewhere.
I teach the colors on Kindergarten Day over a period of a few weeks using books. Any series of simple children’s books that emphasize color will do, but my favorite is the series from Alan Rogers: Red Rhinoceros, Yellow Hippo, Green Bear, and Blue Turtle (I don’t know if those are the real titles or not, I just translated them from the Spanish).
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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!
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.”