Preferred Activity Time

This is something Bryce Hedstrom has talked about in great detail, and it actually comes from Fred Jones' book Tools for Teaching, which I highly recommend.

Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.

We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:

1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.

They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.

Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.

When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.

(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)

Summaries and lies

My upper levels have been learning about magic recently. I love teaching with video clips, since (I'm referencing the delightful and amazing Evan Smith here) visual vocabularies are indispensable. The more we can provide kids with a visual representation of information, the better a handle on it they'll have. So I've shown them three video clips:

-Mickey Mouse from Fantasia, stealing the magician's hat and making the broom do all the work
-David Blaine doing card tricks for Harrison Ford and getting summarily ejected from his house (I highly recommend you google Real or Magic Harrison Ford David Blaine, and then, if you're going to show it to your students, stop it before Indy drops the F bomb)
-The great scene from Hocus Pocus when the witches turn Thackeray Binks into a cat so he can live forever with his guilt (wonderful opportunity to teach the kids pedicis aeternis - in eternal chains - if you've been looking for one of those :D)

fREADom

I gave a presentation this morning on reading and reading skills. Below please see links to the dropbox location of both the PowerPoint and some notes to hopefully help it make sense. :)

Powerpoint
Notes

Putting together my classroom

All links in this post will take you to where you can get those materials, if you should want them. Most are free, but the expectations posters, alas, are not.

This is one of my bookshelves. I'm working on installing rain gutter on my cork board as well. Both of these things allow me to display my books cover-out. Studies indicate that kids are more likely to want to read if they can see the covers of the books, so I have displayed my books that (a) are light enough to put in this and (b) have interesting covers. Those that don't have interesting covers or are too heavy (or don't have pictures in them) are displayed on this bookshelf:



                 


This bookshelf is painted so that it's graded by level. Blue is beginner, red is intermediate (which is a HUGE range), and yellow is advanced. The top shelf is for dictionaries and songbooks.

 This is my corkboard. On the far right, I have our class calendar. This includes everything from JCL events to stuff we've scheduled actually in class. The middle is my Craig's List. I'm teaching mixed level classes this year, but let's be honest - all classes are mixed level. This whiteboard (they make stick-on whiteboard!) allows me to write phrases or synonyms that allow kids to use the words they know or try to level up if they want. The left is divided in two - memoranda and roganda. There's a basket with little papers, and there are pushpins on the cork strip above the board. Memoranda are things kids have asked me to do and are reminding me to do by writing me a note. Roganda are questions that are either off-topic or that the kid didn't want to ask in the moment, and so they pin them to the board. I will answer them on the paper and pin them back up, or find the kid if they write their name on it.


This is my board. The center is for use, the left is for club info, and the right is for weather. Posted along the board are my question words. Each poster has the word, colored, in huge font (at least 90 pt), the word in English smaller in a less interesting color, and pictures that you could associate with the word. I add words as my kids ask me to, but right now, they are to where, from where, where, when, what time, to whom, who, what, whom, whose, where, what kind, how many, why, how. I may have forgotten a couple.




This is my costume corner. I have a massive collection of stuffed animals hung on chains, which are attached to the wall using massive command hooks. (all these are findable on amazon) All my fruit and small plastic toys are in the hanging blue and maroon boxes, which I got at Home Depot. I sewed a piece of fabric to the back and slid them through a dowel rod, which I put on the wall using massive command hooks. There is a smaller hook with fly swatters on. On the table, there is a football helmet that doesn't fit in a box, and a box of cool and intriguing props (ranging from cat toys to I don't even know what). Underneath the table there are milk crates that are zip-tied together. Each is labeled, in Latin and English, with the type of clothing in it. To the left there is a hat box (hats are very important to my students. this also includes wigs and beards). Behind the arch (which represents all buildings all the time), there is a giant urn I got for twelve dollars that contains my foam swords. Above all of that, there's a green do you understand? poster, and it shows them how many fingers to hold up depending on how much they understand.

 These are my expectations posters. One shows what I want them to do in class (sit up straight, respond when I call on you, etc.), and the other is what they call my level up poster. If you're earning a zero, you're not here. If you're earning a 1...etc.

These are my file cabinets. The left hand one is my teaching materials - glitter, ribbons, extra paper, printer paper, classroom decorations, paint, etc. The chest of drawers is paper plates, miscellaneous paper, club files, cleaning supplies, etc. The right hand is the art buckets. You can see art buckets on top of it. I got the buckets, as well as the jackets around/in them, also at Home Depot (pretty cheaply). There are nine (enough for each group of four to have a bucket), and each has markers, scissors, colorful paper, sharpies, glue sticks, colored pencils, etc. The green drawers on the right hold my socks (so we can erase white boards), mini white boards, markers, games (like story cubes and Jenga). The tall tubes of colored paper are in a cheap folding laundry bin I got from Target for five dollars years ago. This way, I always have butcher paper, and they have a place to turn butcher paper projects in.







This is my idiom wall. I have found, especially in reading, that having knowledge and comfortable use of idiom is unbelievably helpful. Each week, each class chooses one, and I put it on the board. Every time someone uses it correctly, they get a piece of candy. I add idioms throughout the year, so the wall never gets stale.

This is my weather board. I include the day of the week, the time of year, and the weather itself. We do the weather daily at the beginning of class. It allows us to practice all three tenses (yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be...), and we get used to questioning, and we get some basic idiomatic vocabulary in. I made all of these in Word and laminated them at the school, and then I stuck magnet tape on the back. You may note that I have two the moon is shining. There is no good reason for that.

Building on writing

I like to do a short writing activity where I pick a topic we've been working with and spend all week writing about it. On day one, the kids are asked to fill in the blanks in a sentence. On day two, the kids are asked to write one sentence about the topic. We share the sentences in class and circle them, and that way the kids hear everyone else's idea.

If I had a superpower - visualizing stories

If I had a superpower, it would be this: I'd love to be able to hold out my hand and just project at will, in the air, images or videos of whatever I happen to be seeing in my mind's eye at the time.

Spin the Bottle as a review game

There is no kissing in this game. :)

Instead, its purpose is to review a story your students have read and know well. You'll need a cheap water bottle with about an inch of water in it and groups of 4 to 5.

You'll need around 40 questions about the story. I generally create some easier ones (who is...) and some harder ones, and several in the middle. Not infrequently, I write the questions, but sometimes I also choose to have the students as part of a different activity write their own comprehension questions about the story.