Recently I have been working with One Word Images (OWI) and Invisibles from Ben Slavic's book TPRS the Easy Way. I am currently teaching all level one students which makes this all much easier than if I had 3-4 different levels. Nonetheless, I have students who have had a beginning level Spanish class and others with very limited exposure to the language if any. I teach middle school where I have a wheel class for sixth grade every nine weeks, two seventh grade classes every semester and two eighth grade year 1 classes.
As we have been creating OWI, I have been writing up the descriptions in Spanish. Since the vocabulary is non-targeted other than my base twelve high frequency verbs, each class has different vocabulary appearing in their stories. Some of it is already overlapping due to the nature of high frequency words (HFW). As I would write these up in Google Docs, I started making a copy of each story or description. One story would be in Spanish with no support. The other would have footnotes for vocabulary that was new. It was fine for the class that came up with the character description or the story, however, because all classes have shared access to the stories, other classes would need to have more footnotes in order to be able to read the text with 100% comprehension. Soon the stories had from 15-20 footnotes. My students were choosing to read them during our sustained silent reading (SSR), but I just did not like them having to wade through so many footnotes. Some students did not even need so many footnotes while others needed each and every one of them.
This morning I was reading posts on my social media when I came across a post by Jillane Baros at profabaros.weebly.com. She has been embedding the class stories so they are more comprehensible to more students. Genius! Why didn't I think of that! So you should definitely check out her website and embedded stories here. She also has audio to go with at least one version of the story so her students can listen again!
Now that I was inspired by Jillane Baros, I decided to work on one of my class stories and change it into an embedded reading. I kept the footnotes but now there are only 5-6 footnotes per level of reading the same story. I hope that this will help my students have a better opportunity in acquiring the base HFW and also gain new vocabulary through a compelling story written by their friends and classmates. Here are the stories in order in Spanish with footnotes:
Donnie la Dona
First Reading
Second Reading
Third Reading
If you would like to see demonstrations of OWI and/or Invisibles in a classroom, I recommend watching Tina Hargaden's videos on the TPRS Hangout channel on YouTube. They are mostly French and Spanish.
As we have been creating OWI, I have been writing up the descriptions in Spanish. Since the vocabulary is non-targeted other than my base twelve high frequency verbs, each class has different vocabulary appearing in their stories. Some of it is already overlapping due to the nature of high frequency words (HFW). As I would write these up in Google Docs, I started making a copy of each story or description. One story would be in Spanish with no support. The other would have footnotes for vocabulary that was new. It was fine for the class that came up with the character description or the story, however, because all classes have shared access to the stories, other classes would need to have more footnotes in order to be able to read the text with 100% comprehension. Soon the stories had from 15-20 footnotes. My students were choosing to read them during our sustained silent reading (SSR), but I just did not like them having to wade through so many footnotes. Some students did not even need so many footnotes while others needed each and every one of them.
This morning I was reading posts on my social media when I came across a post by Jillane Baros at profabaros.weebly.com. She has been embedding the class stories so they are more comprehensible to more students. Genius! Why didn't I think of that! So you should definitely check out her website and embedded stories here. She also has audio to go with at least one version of the story so her students can listen again!
Now that I was inspired by Jillane Baros, I decided to work on one of my class stories and change it into an embedded reading. I kept the footnotes but now there are only 5-6 footnotes per level of reading the same story. I hope that this will help my students have a better opportunity in acquiring the base HFW and also gain new vocabulary through a compelling story written by their friends and classmates. Here are the stories in order in Spanish with footnotes:
Donnie la Dona
First Reading
Second Reading
Third Reading
If you would like to see demonstrations of OWI and/or Invisibles in a classroom, I recommend watching Tina Hargaden's videos on the TPRS Hangout channel on YouTube. They are mostly French and Spanish.
