Using Videos with TPRS

Last week when I was driving home I realized that my students in Spanish 1 knew almost all of the words necessary to understand an interesting animated video that I had used earlier for a conversation activity with my Spanish 4 students. I decided to pre-teach the remaining words and then used TPRS to explain and act out the story.

****UPDATE****
Update - ALMA continues to gain popularity! Below are links to additional ALMA activities recently created (Dec. 2012-Jan 2013) by other teachers. All updates can be found on Laurie Clarcq's amazing "Embedded Reading" blog.  
a - Click HERE to see @fravan amazing activity on ALMA.
b - Click HERE  for an Embedded Reading (created by Nina)
c - Alma LECTURA (created by Doug Stone)
d - Alma Repasito  (created by Doug Stone)
****UPDATE****

1. The two stories used to pre-teach some of the vocabulary and the ALMA story are in the document below. For the Osama story, we made the story in class and the following day I distributed the paper so students could fill in the blanks as a review and then we wrote the ending of the story.



2. After the pre-teaching of vocabulary was finished, I told the story about Alma using TPRS, circling technique, w/ some acting. After I told a small part of the story, I paused so students could sketch the scene. They sketched 6 different scenes. Then I showed the movie "Alma" and stopped the movie right before Alma touches the nose of the doll, because, of course, we ran out of time to watch the ending.



3. Since I stopped the video before Alma actually touched the doll's nose, the students' homework for the night was to sketch what they thought happened. The next day, one of the review activities was to put their sketches under the document camera and students had to think of a sentence or sentences to describe what was going to happen. The sketches were also handy as a review of the story - partner work for retelling usually works great.

4. I also made a photo collage of parts of the story. Photo collages or sketches are great for reviewing because I will say a sentence and then the students tell me which picture that action occurred. Or, sometimes as a class we retell the story frame by frame using the photo collage or a student's sketch.

view video at: http://youtu.be/irbFBgI0jhM

5. Tomorrow we will do 3 Cloze activities as another review of the vocabulary and events in the story.

ALMA - Cloze Activity #1

ALMA - Cloze Activity #2

ALMA - Cloze Activity #3

UPDATE: Click HERE to find additional ALMA materials (they're awesome!) that Martina Bex created in December 2011.

I love finding short videos to use in the class. The students like it because it changes things up for the day and I like it because it keeps their attention which means more repetitions with a captive audience.

Next year when I use this story, I'll pre-teach more clothing vocabulary first! That was a missed opportunity.

**Even though many people recommend using past tenses from the start, I am in my first semester of only TPRS with my Spanish 1 students so I'd like to feel a bit more comfortable with the TPRS method before I teach the past tense from Day 1.**