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Dr. Liam Printer - 'The Motivated Classroom' Educational Consultant, Author, Researcher
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Student-centered ways to review a TPRS novel

16/5/2016

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The TPRS novels have completely revolutionized my teaching. In the past 3 years I have used a wide variety of these readers with diverse student groups, levels and ages. While of course, the actual story line, plot and themes appeal differently to each individual student depending on their own personal interests, the idea of reading a whole novel entirely in Spanish and actually understanding what is going on, is hugely motivational across the board. 
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My students are all very familiar with my mantra "Leer es poder" (reading is 'power' or​ reading is 'being able', a play on words and sounds), so much so that when I say "Leer es..." the whole class will shout "PODER" back at me.

Personally I believe that part of our role as language teachers is to instill a love for reading. Teaching skills as well as content is widely recognised as part of our profession and reading is a skill. A skill that moves our students so far forward with their language learning, and with the TPRS books making this skill 'compelling', it motivates students to keep turning pages and keep acquiring more language.

In terms of reviewing a novel, I am not a big fan of the standard content testing so I have tried a few activities like 'the yellow brick road' and 'freeze frame' from Martina Bex among others. This time round I decided to make it more student-centered hopefully meaning higher engagement and less work for me! Win win!
Student-Centered Novel Reviewing:
  1. First each student was given a chapter (some chapters were assigned to more than 1 student). They had to find a phrase or quotation (maximum 8 words) that summed up the key information in this chapter.
  2. Next they wrote this in big letters on yellow card paper after I had approved it.
  3. I collected these all in; shuffled them and then gave a set of cards to each table of 4-5 students.
  4. Their next job was to try to find the chapter number and page for each phrase in their groups.
  5. Once they had this they had to put them in order. The first group finished was the winner.
  6. Next we used these for The Yellow Brick Activity where students in pairs used these phrases to talk about what was happening at that moment in the book.
  7. The final piece of the jigsaw was The Freeze Frame activity. We did various takes on this using the cards the students had created. In some scenes they had to act out the scene previous to what was on their card and finish frozen on their phrase, while in others they just acted that sentence.
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Freeze frame superstars
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Students working to find the phrases
The students really enjoyed all aspects of this and I am very happy that they know this novel inside out now. I prefer to always have the students do the work wherever possible and these fit nicely into that approach. One possible nice extension activity would be to ask the students to make up a completely new scene in a totally different context with the phrase they have on their card. Give them some time to prepare it and either act it out or record it.
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Creating the yellow brick road cards
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Props in use for freeze frame time
As always I would welcome your comments and shares. Please let me know if you have done anything different as I am always keen to learn and try new ideas.
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Review your novel with the 'Yellow Brick Road'!

28/4/2015

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Doing a book or novel in class is something my classes seem to enjoy a lot but it can be a challenge keeping it interesting and figuring out ways to evaluate their learning. I came across Carrie Toth's excellent website somewheretoshare.com last month and she has some wonderful ideas to do with novels.

I decided to use a version of her "Yellow Brick Road" one to recap and revise over the key points in the book once we had finished. The idea is you have 1-2 key 'triggers' of chunks of words from each chapter and these are used to jog the students memory to aid their discussion. The only difference I had was that I actually got the students to make the yellow 'bricks' and they chose the statements themselves.

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I gave each pair of students a chapter (or some important chapters had 3 people working on it) and they had to find a key phrase that would jog our memories as to what happened at that point in the book. The only rule was it could be no more than 5 words. This part seemed to work really well, each student could be seen actively re-reading the chapter to try and pick the most appropriate word chunk for their poster.

Once everyone was finished a few students laid out all the yellow 'bricks' for our road out in the corridor. They did this in order as I felt like otherwise the chunks of words may not make sense to them. Students spoke in groups at each step using the prompt on the floor to help them. After about 60-90 seconds I would stop the music and they'd move on to the next card. To change things up sometimes I'd ask them to move 2 or 3 steps forward. I also mixed up the groups and pairs after about 4 steps so they weren't always talking to the same person.

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I think the students really liked it and it worked really well as a student centred review activity. They were receiving lots of comprehensible input from their classmates and it certainly helped them to review and revise for the end of book evaluation. High five and thumbs up to the yellow brink road... I'll be using it again!


I'd love to know your comments and how you evaluate and review books/novels you have done in class! Leave me your comments below or follow me @liamprinter on twitter!

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    Author

    Dr. Liam Printer:
    Host of The Motivated Classroom podcast, keynote speaker, presenter, lecturer, language teacher, teacher trainer, educational consultant, published author and basketball coach. 14 years teaching experience in a variety of educational settings. Currently I am the Teaching & Learning Research Lead and Approaches to Learning Coordinator at the International School of Lausanne in Switzerland where I also teach language acquisition.

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